David Schulzmann, University of Southern Denmark
This paper uses a single-company case study of the effects of the adoption of Virtual Reality Technology (VRT) on global strategy. The potential of VRT to reduce spatial distance, hierarchical distance, and intra-cultural distance within the multinational enterprise (MNE) is explored. VRT improves the social integration experience without incurring the costs of travel and accommodation and perceived distance diminishes due to the immediacy of reactions and the ability of avatars to reduce spatial distance by moving around in the three-dimensional world. From the perspective of internalization theory, the size of firms could potentially be augmented as the benefits of internalizing markets and managing them in this enhanced fashion are likely to exceed the increased costs of internalization. Authors: David Schulzmann, Ulf Andersson and Peter Buckley.
