Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2011
Introduction
Companies engaged in Research and Development (R&D) in highly competitive global industries have to take into consideration numerous factors such as reduced delivery time, cost reduction, and increased demands for differentiated products with higher quality (Balbontin et al., 2000). Management issues, such as supply-chain management, alliance strategies, and outsourcing strategies, have been introduced to solve the aforementioned problems, and have become primary methods used by many companies (Boyle et al., 2006; Li et al., 2005). Stiff competition has forced companies to consider the relocation of R&D activities to foreign locations (“offshoring”) and/or to external service providers (“outsourcing”) in networks to develop new strategies, capacities, and capabilities. By tapping into external networks, the companies can make use of focused expertise and concentrated resources. They can also take advantage of diversified cutting-edge technologies by sharing risks and benefits with the participants inside the networks. The trend of R&D management structure is changing from being ethnocentric centralized to geocentric centralized, and then to polycentric decentralized. The current R&D management structure tends to be decentralized and cooperative. The primary manufacturing operation has become the mass customization system in industry. All of these are to meet the urgent demands for carrying out R&D in decentralized and cooperative R&D networks.
Even though carrying out cooperative R&D is important, only very few researchers have examined R&D in decentralized and cooperative R&D networks (Andersson et al., 2002; Belderbos et al., 2004; Helble and Li, 2004).
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