Coevolution of individual and firm-specific competences: the imprinting conditions and globalization of the Jaakko Pöyry group, 1946–1980

Abstract

Finland remained in many ways isolated from the process of Americanization in Western Europe until the 1980s. This paper inquires into the history of a Finnish firm that was founded and successfully internationalized in the 1950s, to reveal why and how this firm adopted leading American management ideas and practices into its process of internationalisation without any direct American agency. Firstly, the paper reviews how there is gap between the American and Nordic traditions in research into the internationalisation of the firm, as well as how the coevolutionary framework can help to bridge the gap. Secondly, it reviews methods of social history and ethnography. Thirdly, it presents the imprinting conditions and history of the Jaakko Pöyry Group from 1946 to 1980 as a partly sequential and partly coevolutionary process of three elements: 1) the entrepreneurial development of core competences by a founder individual; 2) entrepreneurial diversification of markets and services by the firm he founded, and 3) coevolution between the firm and the founder within the environments in which they were embedded. The end of the paper will conclude (a) how the firm emerged to play a leading role in its chosen industry, (b) why the firm and its founder could function as global brokers of knowledge and competences in a country otherwise largely isolated from an international process of convergence, and (c) what kind of general lessons this particular combination of individual agency and globalization might contain.

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Notes on contributors

Antti Ainamo

The author gratefully acknowledges funding for this study from the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation and from the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, as well as access to data from colleagues at the Jaakko Pöyry Group. Kari Lilja's suggestion to consider Fernand Brandel's work and comments from two anonymous referees and the guest editors of this special issue were important conceptual inputs. Comments from Ray Levitt, Risto Tainio, Tapio Koivu, Sampo Tukiainen, and Johan na Nummelin greatly improved the article in the end. Any misconceptions presented in the article remain the sole responsibility of the author.