Narrow Results

This paper examines the relationship between R&D collaborations with local organizations in the host countries and the performance of overseas R&D bases, considering the types of collaborations. The result of an empirical analysis shows that, while collaborations with local companies in the same industry of the host country just enhance the efficiency of R&D activities, those with local universities, public research institutions, and companies in the different industries increase the overall R&D performance including the efficiency of R&D activities and the quality of technological outputs. Also, as a factor that enables companies to build external networks, the effect of the nationality of top manager and researchers of R&D bases is investigated. The result demonstrates that R&D bases with top managers from the home countries are less active in developing R&D collaborations with local universities and that, as the percentage of the researchers from the home countries increases, the R&D bases tend to develop R&D collaborations with local companies in the same industry, but they do not develop those with local universities and other research institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of internal embeddedness of overseas R&D base, or the relationship with its parent company, on innovation performance of the base. While existing studies that examined the internal embeddedness have paid most attention to control–autonomy dimension, this paper takes into consideration the factors of information, human, and capital interaction between the base and the parent. Through such multi-faceted investigation, we found that the bases with weaker control by parent and stronger information linkage with parent demonstrated higher performance. Moreover, the research result revealed that the human interaction, e.g., the transfer of R&D manager from parent, had a pivotal roles affecting the degree of both control and information linkage. With these findings, it was argued that to balance dependency and independency in the base–parent relationship and to design appropriate human interactions for realising it would be important management issues in global R&D.