Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEs) are today one of the most important destination in the internationalisation process of Italian firms, thanks to the big opportunities they offer in terms of huge amount of the potential demand, the geographical proximity and the low production costs.
The small dimension of Italian firms imposes very often restrictions in terms of budget and resource availability, and co-operations become the most frequent internationalisation mode for their advantages in reducing the limits of the small dimension. Nevertheless co-operations with CEE partners are often unsuccessful and cultural incompatibility among the partners -or cultural misunderstanding among them- are some of the most frequent causes of failure.
During their internationalisation process into Central and Eastern Europe, Italian firms come actually in contact with different cultural environments, requiring different approaches and ways of interaction.
The aim of this paper is to investigate how cross-cultural differences impact on knowledge management and organisational learning in firms international co-operation, national culture having a strong impact on the international transferability of managerial practices and of scientific and technological knowledge.