Transcript National Innovation Systems and Research Outsourcing

National Innovation Systems
and the Outsourcing of
Research
Conference on Global R&D in China
Nanjing, May 27-29, 2005
Richard P. Suttmeier
University of Oregon
[email protected]
The “NIS” Concept
Innovation as systemic phenomenon
 The relevance of institutional and
cultural legacies
 The “national” in “NIS”
 NIS and the globalization of
innovation
 Contradictions?

“Outsourcing”
Markets, hierarchies, transaction
costs, and the search for
“complementary assets”
 The changed calculus

• The IT revolution
• Challenges of innovation
• “Global” diffusion of S&T capabilities

Rethinking the “boundary of the
firm”
Outsourcing R&D and NIS
Companies and countries
 The inevitable tensions between
“source” and “target”
 Enhancing NIS through technoglobalism ?

• Managing tensions through domestic
compensatory measures
• Harmonization of international norms

“Win-win” outcomes?
The China Case

NIS characteristics
• Capable research system
• Weak industrial innovation tradition
• Research – production gap
• IPR, VC problems

Trajectory of Chinese NIS(?)
• “Enterprise - centered” (model 1)
• “Networked” (no center) (model 2)
Foreign R&D in China

Add value to NIS
• Exploit under-utilized talent
• Incubate talent
• Capitalize innovation
• Illustrate how to close the research –
production gap
• Demonstrate network management
• Reinforce “model 2”
• Promote harmonization of norms
Questions



Relative and absolute gains
Are national compensatory policies
consistent with the network “imperatives”
of outsourcing?
Foreign R&D and International
Cooperation in S&T (ICST)
• “Spillovers”
• Effects on “self-organizing communities”
• Business models and the “intellectual
commons”