Os preditores isomórficos e estratégicos da prática de tropicalização: um estudo de casos múltiplos em subsidiárias de montadoras de máquinas agrícolas instaladas no Brasil

Abstract

Striving for growth and greater financial returns, many foreign companies have decided to internationalize their activities beyond their borders. In Brazil, this action had more prominence after the opening of the Brazilian market to foreign capital in the 1990’s, a period which companies of different nationalities started or increased their participation in the national market. The entry of these companies in Brazil brought with them a strong increase in competitiveness among these organizations, which work in an environment of rapid economic changes and technological advances, needs to meet the increasingly demanding consumers. Starting from this scenario, the development of new products becomes a critical point when related to the success of a company. Within the context of the development of new products in subsidiaries of multinational companies, especially in the Brazilian case, there is a practice of strategic importance, common among the subsidiaries of automakers installed in our country, this process is called “tropicalization”. This practice can be understood as the process of adapting a product project from other markets to the local context. The objective of this project is to investigate the antecedents of the tropicalization of products in multinational companies assembling agricultural machines, as well as to explore the practices and the challenges that influence in this phenomenon. The research presents the project, to managers of new products of multinational companies at the beginning of their career, the main challenges to which they will be submitted so that they can conduct their activities in tune with the strategies of the top management, as well as the pressures of the external environment to the organization. The research is divided into three stages: in the first stage, a literature review is presented, where concepts and definitions related to the research constructs are exposed; the next stage is composed of a case study of two multinational companies assembling agricultural machinery; the final stage presents the results of the research, evidencing that the level of centralization of engineering projects exerts influence in tropicalization projects based on factors such as the choice of design control, the accumulation of competences of the subsidiary and the level of complexity of the project. Similarly, the research points out that the normative, coercive, mimetic and competitive isomorphic pressures also exert an influence on the tropicalization process through factors such as optimization of the productive process, regulatory measures carried out by the government, the needs of rural producers, among others.