Internal and inter-organizational collaborations created by companies and standards that transcend national boundaries

As the world has become increasingly globalised, it is now commonplace for companies to have a head office in one country, but various outposts in other countries. Manufacturing is one of the prime examples of this, where the main driving force of an organisation is located in one place but production sites are located overseas. Indeed, the flexibility of a company's ability to relocate production sites overseas is seen as an effective strategy for global manufacturing firms. However, there is a traditional way of viewing such structures, where the main headquarters of a company are the lifeblood of that company, with the localised production sites seen as almost peripheral. Professor Nobuko Nishiwaki is based within the Nihon University College of Economics in Japan, and is the Principal Investigator of a project that seeks to qualify and establish the importance of local production sites; that they are far more than passive actors in the process by which production is relocated. She is working alongside colleagues Associate Professor Akitsu Oe from the Tokyo University of Science and Professor Takashi Shimizu from The University of Tokyo.