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In large technology-based firms, especially in long life cycle industries, often a tension exists between corporate R&D and the business unit (BU) customers. The long term R&D orientation needed to come to the more radical (even disruptive) innovations for the long term survival of the prospector firm being at odds with the need of the BUs for more incremental "sustaining" innovations for their day-to-day activities. This paper takes a new approach to this problem by analyzing the corporate R&D to business relationship from a customer value perspective by identifying R&D flexibility, R&D communication, strategic alignment and R&D performance as the main attributes of the value map of the BU customers of corporate R&D. We then present the Cusvalin instrument (Customer Value Learning in INnovation) that was constructed to overcome the R&D to business incongruence by providing feedback on the gaps between the value maps of R&D and their BU customers. This instrument has been tested in a longitudinal survey from 1997 through 2002 (696 respondents) in a large technology-based supplier company (±30 000 employees world wide). It is concluded that the Cusvalin model is an effective instrument to monitor the strategic alignment of R&D and the BUs, and ultimately leads to better R&D performance, as perceived by the BU customers. From the longitudinal analysis it is concluded that a system that balances radical innovation (via Technology Board-funding, in which R&D management, headquarters, and BU directors jointly decide on long-term radical R&D projects) and incremental innovation (via BU unit-funding) is effective in providing strategic alignment between R&D and business.

This paper has studied correlation between knowledge management (KM) and performance of research and development (R&D) in a major automobile manufacturing company. Two questionnaires were used. Choy's "KM performance outcomes" approach was used for KM and customized balanced score card (BSC) model for measuring R&D centers' performance. The population consisted of all R&D employees in a company that has been working in auto industry, along with all its 12 subsidiaries which had R&D centers. Then three out of 12 companies were selected by cluster sampling from which 90 people were chosen to complete the questionnaires. The results showed a significant positive correlation between KM and the performance of R&D centers as well as three aspects of BSC, i.e. customer, internal processes and innovation. For the other aspects, the findings did not show any significant correlations.

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.