Management of Technology and Innovation in Japan

Differences in the Internationalization of Industrial R&D in the Triad 299
relevance for strategic management and thus for management research. To contribute
to our understanding of the dynamics unfolding in the field of international
R&D, the survey looked at strategies companies follow to respond to global technological
issues.
Degree and Development of International R&D Activities
One way to get a notion of the importance of R&D internationalization in quantitative
terms is to look at the degree of internationalization, defined as the share of
the overall R&D budget spent for R&D beyond the borders of a company’s home
region. This figure includes R&D activities of a company’s researchers abroad as
well as the purchase of technology or technologically important products. A striking
imbalance comes to the fore if one looks at the regional origin of the companies
(see Tab 1). Japanese companies are much less inclined to generate technological
knowledge abroad and to engage in international R&D activities than
North American or Western European ones. The forward projection for the year
2001 from the point of view of the companies investigated indicates that the internationalization
of R&D proceeds. Using the regression method a still growing
trend towards internationalization of R&D for the year 2004 can be extrapolated.
Table 1. Percentage of R&D budget spent outside the home country
1995 1998 2001 Own estimation
2004
Investigated companies
from
25.75 30.27 33.37 43.72 Western Europe
4.67 7.02 10.52 14.56 Japan
23.17 28.38 31.67 35.07 North America
Having had a look at the quantitative dimension of R&D internationalization,
we now turn to the analysis of what activities companies perform internationally.
Within a range from 1 (very little non-domestic activity) to 5 (significant nondomestic
activity) there is a peak of 3.4 for joint technology development, followed
by activities at own laboratories (3.1), license acquisition (3.06) and acquisition
of products and companies (2.9) (see Fig. 8). Again, interesting differences
between the regional clusters are obvious. For both Japanese and European companies
international R&D collaboration is the most important strategic means in
international R&D, whereas for North American companies the activities in own
laboratories abroad are most important (mean of 3.2). In addition, Japanese companies
are more active in acquiring foreign licenses (mean 3.5) than European
(mean 2.8), and especially North American companies (mean 2.6) (see Fig. 8).
To find out how the various international R&D activities are spread around the
globe, each company was asked to indicate which of four given R&D activities it
performs within six different economic regions. These target regions are North
America, western Europe, eastern Europe, Japan, Asia/Pacific other than Japan,