Transferring Know-How — Lift the Marmara Subsidiary to NordHaus Standards

A four-round, advanced international-management simulation set inside Marmara Beyaz Eşya A.Ş., a 1,400-employee Turkish home-appliance maker in the Gebze industrial corridor (revenue ₺11.8bn ≈ €330M, EBITDA 9% vs the 13% group standard). Eighteen months ago the German multinational NordHaus Group acquired 80% of the equity for its low-cost base and MENA access. The acquisition thesis assumed Marmara would absorb NordHaus' lean-manufacturing, supplier-quality and stage-gate know-how and converge within 24 months — but the integration relied on manuals and an intranet, and almost nothing moved. Defects sit at 14,000 DPMO against a 3,500 group standard (₺290M/year warranty), productivity is 35% short, and time-to-market is 22 months vs 14. On 9 March 2026 the NordHaus COO issues a 12-month convergence ultimatum: demonstrate measurable progress or local management is replaced by an expatriate team. Playing the subsidiary leadership team, you (1) diagnose why an 18-month integration produced no convergence — classifying each capability gap as tacit or explicit and locating the dominant knowledge-stickiness barrier in source, channel, recipient or context (Szulanski); (2) allocate a fixed €2.4M transfer budget and a scarce pool of seconded-engineer days across mechanisms — codification, expert secondments, inpatriate assignments to Stuttgart, joint problem-solving, communities of practice and a digital twin — matching mechanism to knowledge type (Polanyi/Nonaka); (3) negotiate the standardise-vs-adapt alignment contract with HQ and the founding family, build supervisor absorptive capacity (Cohen & Levinthal), design inpatriate reintegration, and make the retention move for an at-risk seconded engineer who just received a competitor counter-offer; and (4) commit a 12-month convergence plan with quarterly KPI targets and defend the mechanism→capability→metric→EBITDA chain to the COO. The math rewards Kiessling's core finding — transfer lifts performance only when paired with strategic alignment — and punishes the five classic errors: codifying tacit know-how, mechanism-shopping past the budget and engineer-day caps, wholesale standardisation without local adaptation, inpatriation with no reintegration, and neglecting the fragile engineer channel. Final KPIs track Transfer Effectiveness, Strategic Alignment, Subsidiary Performance (convergence index) and Engineer Retention, with budget reported in € to HQ and warranty/EBITDA stakes in ₺.