ABSTRACT
The outsourcing and offshoring of production and services has been recognised as a major trend in the first decade of the twenty-first century (UNCTAD, 2004). Apart from arguments of cost savings, many outsourcing decisions by multinational companies (MNCs) are driven by the expectation of value added through access to external knowledge (Maskell et al., 2005). Despite the observation of outsourcing as a common feature of most sectors, the argumentations, options, institutional designs and regional impact of such decisions differ across firms, regions and sectors. Within this chapter, the specificity of such a process is shown by investigating the relevance of regional characteristics that influence opportunities of MNCs to improve their creativity in the case of aeronautics as one sector requiring specified technological knowledge and cultures of interaction. The region analysed is the metropolitan region of Hamburg, which had the highest per-capita gross domestic product of any EU region in 2004 (C45,363). Within the past decade the aeronautics industry became the dominant manufacturing sector within the region, a result of Airbus’s decision to locate its centre of excellence in cabin interior systems and final assembly for all single-aisle models within the region, and the decline of several other industries (Lublinski, 2003). As the aeronautics sector is generally confronted with huge structural changes (Zuliani et al., 2003), sources of organisational, cultural and technological creativity become more evident and give rise to new threats and opportunities to the region.
