Internationalization of research and development: Evidence from the semiconductor and wireless telecommunications industries.

摘要

Economic and regional literature have questioned the extent to which Research and Development (R&D) activities of Multinational Corporations (MNCs) have globalized, which types of R&D are offshored, and how this internationalization is shaped by, but also shapes the R&D strategies of companies and their home countries. My research contributes to this debate, by providing evidence and argument that reaffirms the importance of the domestically performed tasks.; This dissertation examines, empirically, the location, and locational dynamics of strategic R&D in two truly global industries: semiconductors and wireless telecommunications. Two different mixes of data assess the following research questions: (1) is it possible to find new and convincing evidence of R&D internationalization in two industries that share evident signs of global sourcing of both production and demand? (2) What are still today the constraints, or forces, that keep technology activities homebound, and what are the forces that pull them globally?; Contrary to expectations, the results clearly support the case for "non-globalization", and suggest that in spite of growing internationalization of operations, there is no convincing evidence to reject the hypothesis that core technology activities remain homebound.; These empirical findings are robust, but should be tagged with some caution. They are fixed in time, and may therefore change. Interviews with R&D managers, as well as the secondary evidence gathered and presented here, suggest that a more international distribution of R&D operations is likely in the years to come, when MNCs will learn how to better "appropriate" results of their foreign technological activities, as they will mature strategies to absorb and capture value from their offshored R&D.