Abstract

This study reports a series of strategizing practices exercised by an offshore R&D (Research and Development) centre to gain survival through influencing headquarters’ decisions. It analyses how low-power actors promote ideas to, and leverage resources with, high-power actors. As a result, this emergent process transforms a multinational corporation’s design chain strategy in the research and development of semiconductor technologies. Our findings describe the dynamics of power shift through tracing paths of influence, practices of gaining influences and interaction patterns under the influence. This article highlights five leveraging practices to gain influences, resulting in changing organizational identities. This research offers various implications to the literature of strategy-as-practice, power in multinational corporations and offshore innovation.