Funding Sources and the Strategic Roles of Decentralized R&D in Multinationals

Abstract

A key implication of the growth of decentralized R&D in MNEs has been a comparable increase in the extent and diversity of knowledge flows within these companies. Early views of the MNE saw knowledge flow as almost uniquely a matter of many separate and distinct, bilateral and unidirectional, routes from the home-country parent to individual subsidiaries. This provided the basis of the only role then perceived as routinely available for overseas R&D laboratories, in the form of helping to assimilate and operationalize those group technologies on which subsidiaries were essentially dependent. However, as the changing competitive environment imposed increasing strategic diversity on MNEs an important manifestation of this took the form of a notable growth in dispersed R&D, with this playing an enhanced range of roles within not just the application but also the generation of these companies’ core technologies. A crucial implication of this was, in turn, the ability of decentralized labs to supply as well as receive technology and, therefore, the growth of multidirectional knowledge flows in MNEs.¹