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A Study of Overseas R&D activities of Taiwanese MNCsTsai, Chun-hui 27 June 2005 (has links)
Many Taiwanese multinational corporation (MNC) increase the proportion of their foreign direct investment in R&D activities year by year. The companies investing in the advanced nations operate R&D activities in the local market obviously. Through this thesis, we desire to know the status of overseas R&D sites in these cases and their motives. Futhermore, we also want to discuss how they build up and operate these R&D sites. Due to much more innovative knowledge resources outside the parent country, Taiwanese companies need to globalize their R&D sites to acquire the R&D results; in addition, establish the network of overseas R&D sites makes MNCs to promote their products in the global market smoothly. However, MNCs have to disperse their corporate resources in diffirent locations, and give each site diffirent roles and tasks. Other important issues among these MNCs are how to manage these dispersed R&D sites to achieve the efficiency and the flexibility and what the strategies they consider.
Overseas R&D activity of Taiwanese MNCs is still evolving, and Taiwanese companies have their particular background. In order to find out the causes of this situation, we used the case study approach. We selected the cases which had the complete building process of overseas R&D activities, and interviewed the top managers who had the experiences in the process to gather the materials. Besides, other second-hand materials are also providing us more information to comprehend our sample cases.
We found that Taiwanese MNCs had diffirent motives in each stage. They need to respond to local market, and provide the commercial products rapidly. In addition, local technology and human resource are also the important wealth to strengthen headquarters¡¦ R&D capabilities. Under the consideration of speed, cost and competition, MNCs integrated the R&D resources of parent and host countries aggressively, and they had to think how to match the corporate strategy. Further, they tried to manage organizational information flows and coordinate these R&D activities. Moreover, using several kinds of communication patterns helps headquarters to understand and control overseas R&D activities, and makes R&D knowledge and experiences circulate inside the organization to stimulate organizational innovative capacity.
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