Masahiro Kotosaka is a DPhil in Management Studies candidate at Saïd Business School, and is a member of the SIEB (Strategy, Entrepreneurship and International Business) group.
He has been working on understanding how multinational enterprises, especially “Born Global”, construct and govern their globally distributed business operations, with particular focus on how external environment influences their boundary and location configurations. His current project aims to find a way to reconcile different theories of multinational enterprises and explain how firms make make-or-buy and location decisions concurrently in the globalized business environment. His master’s thesis, titled “Global Value Chain for Firms ‘Born Global’: Criteria for Make-or-Buy and Location Decisions”, developed a perspective on how small and medium size firms are making use of international resources for their output and input markets, and was awarded a distinction.
Masahiro has a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Information from Keio University and an MSc in Management Research with Distinction from Saïd Business School. Before joining Oxford’s Doctoral Programme, he spent 8 years building his business experience. While completing his undergraduate degree, he has run three profitable business ventures in the field of IT and retail. After graduation, he spent four years working as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, first in Tokyo and then in Frankfurt. In this role, he worked for strategy/marketing projects with sixteen client organisations across nine industries and eight countries.