An exploration of Swedish companies' offshoring of R&D activities to China
Paper in proceeding, 2010

A trend among manufacturing companies is offshoring of R & D. The aim of this study is to investigate Swedish companies' offshoring of R & D activities to China, utilizing both a survey and explorative case studies. The survey results show that 9% of the companies have offshored R & D to China, that performance in China is satisfactory, primarily in terms of costs, and that there is a need for strong integration mechanisms to handle coordination and information sharing. Based on the case studies, a categorization of firms offshoring R & D into Market- & Talent-driven firms and Low-cost & Supplydriven firms is proposed, as these have different challenges and require different managerial solutions. Finally, a dilemma concerning information sharing and innovation is identified and discussed. © 2010 IEEE.

Offshoring

R&D

China

Innovation

Author

L. Hafström

Lund University

M. Magnusson

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Anna Max

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Innovation and R&D Management

5th IEEE International Conference on Management of Innovation and Technology, ICMIT2010, Singapore; 2 June 2010 through 5 June 2010

306-311
978-142446567-5 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics

DOI

10.1109/ICMIT.2010.5492707

ISBN

978-142446567-5

More information

Latest update

3/2/2018 9