ABSTRACT
Critics however have pointed out that worldwide distribution of innovation activities is limited by the fact that knowledge cannot flow freely and without constraints across national and organizational borders, Becker-Ritterspach (2006) and Patel and Pavitt (1991), for example, analyse the R&D activities of multinational businesses as ‘an important case of “non-globalisation” ’ – a result that corresponds to the findings of Ruigrok and van Tulder (1995: 159), who observed that none of the Fortune 100 largest non-financial companies in the world ‘is truly “global”, “footloose” or “borderless” . . . R&D remains firmly under domestic control’. Even if now companies rely to a considerable extent on foreign R&D capacities – above all as a result of international mergers and acquisitions – Patel and
Vega (1999) and Le Bas and Sierra (2002) convincingly demonstrate that the technological competences in the homeland of multinational companies still play an important role for the internationalization strategies of MNCs. Only 10.5 per cent or 17 per cent, respectively, of the MNCs considered in these two studies were able to appropriate new technological competences abroad if they did not have such competences at their disposal in the homeland. Phene and Almeida (2008: 913) show that the technological abilities of subsidiaries depend above all on the national context and hardly at all on company-wide knowledge flows. On the one hand, R&D efforts thus are increasingly internationalized. On the other hand, however, the headquarters of the companies and those competences concentrated in the country of origin still play a crucial role for the location of R&D. The question therefore is how the observed internationalization of R&D can be reconciled with the crucial role of domestic locations and competences. This question can hardly be answered on the basis of existing empirical studies, because these rarely analyse concrete trans-border innovation processes (Zander and Sölvell 2000: 45). Therefore, in the following, we examine the possibilities and limitations of international R&D projects on the basis of two selected innovation case studies in order to analyse how organizations deal with the above-mentioned contradiction. We will analyse how international innovation projects are organized, how they can transcend national borders, which R&D activities are internationalized and which advantages and disadvantages international collaborations have for the projects we observed. Unlike other studies, we will not concentrate on the mere existence of foreign R&D centres (Zedtwitz and Gassmann 2002) or on the country of residence of an inventor that registers a patent (Patel and Vega 1999, Le Bas and Sierra 2002). In order to analyse the possibilities and limitations of trans-border innovation projects, we propose in the following a conceptual framework which takes into account the cognitive, strategic and normative (or contextual) dimensions of trans-border innovation projects. These projects can be analysed as learning processes, as bargaining and power relationships and as institutionally and culturally embedded activities. In these three dimensions, innovation projects have to balance the advantages of spatially and organizationally concentrated projects and the advantages of distributed innovation projects (Section 1). On the basis of two international innovation projects,1 we analyse how the companies deal with these contradictory requirements (Section 2). Faced with the necessity for cooperation in complex innovation projects, company-wide as well as external collaborations are selectively used for non-strategic tasks which can be easily decoupled from the core of the innovation project (Fritsch and Franke 2004). In the core of the observed innovation processes, MNCs choose spatially concentrated, intra-organizational forms of cooperation at one site or in the same region. Foreign locations and external companies are only involved for strategically less crucial tasks. Preferably, only the results of largely finished and already patented innovation projects are transferred to other locations or companies. Despite the possible advantages of international and collaborative innovation projects which could exploit company-wide and external knowledge resources, the exploitation
of direct, informal communication and cooperation and the protection and development of the organizational core competences are often more important (Section 3). In one case however, we were able to observe a trans-border innovation project where the competences were spatially distributed – also the result of a carefully designed international management structure.
