Internationalisation of industrial R&D

National Systems of Innovation in Comparison: Structure and Performance Indicators for Knowledge Societies

Volumn , Issue , 2006, Pages 47-66

  Belitz, Heike ^a   Edler, Jakob ^b   Grenzmann, Christoph ^c  

^a DIW BERLIN   (Germany)

^b FRAUNHOFER INSTITUTE FOR SYSTEMS AND INNOVATION RESEARCH ISI   (Germany)

^c NONE

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EID: 75549087171     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1007/1-4020-4949-1_4     Document Type: Chapter

References (23)

1. SV Wissenschaftsstatistik GmbH is the R&D statistics branch of the Donors' Association for German Research (Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft).
2. Findings from earlier studies published in English can be found in Beise & Belitz (1998; 1999), Belitz (2000; 2002; 2004a and 2004b)
3. Multinational companies are assigned to the home countries from which they are controlled. As a rule, this is also where companies' majority ownership is based. In this process, national and international statistics on foreign direct investment usually apply lower threshold values in terms of share ownership; in the case of the German Central Bank (Bundesbank), for example, this value stands at 10 per cent. However, different threshold values in the statistics influence findings of analyses on the cross-border activity of multinational companies only marginally and are therefore not taken into account here.
4. See, for example Markusen (2001/2002) and the literature cited there (Bloningen et al. 2002).
5. The database used for publication analysis was the Science Citation Index.
6. Persons employed in all companies minus the number employed in foreign-owned companies.
7. Cf. Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (2004).
8. The most prominent example of this expansion was the fusion of Daimler-Benz AG with the US Chrysler Corporation, which in 1998 became DaimlerChrysler - with a strong effect on the number of patents held and applied for by German companies. The acquisition of Rover by BMW in the United Kingdom has had similar effects on the United Kingdom patents of German fir ms (Edler et al. 2003)
9. R&D intensity is measured as R&D personnel as a share of all employees, or R&D expenditure as a share of turnover.
10. US Department of Commerce: US Affiliates of Foreign Companies, various years. Data cover all companies in which Germans hold at least ten per cent of the shares.
11. The high share of the United Kingdom in 1998 is mainly due to the acquisition of Rover by BMW that is history already and that was, moreover, not motivated by the R&D potential of the British car company.
12. The concept of lead markets and their role in R&D location decisions of multinationals is described in detail by Beise (2001).
13. Internationalisation has decreased in the two technological fields Telecommunications and Audio-Visual Technology, both from the electronics area.
14. See Edler (2003; 2004) for details of the methodology used here.
15. Knowledge intensity is here defined as the number of cited publications within a patent document (Grupp & Schmoch 1992; Schmoch 2003a). Grupp & Schmoch determined the knowledge intensity by analysing patent documents for the 28 technological areas and calculating knowledge indexes for each technological area. While the average index across all technological fields is 0.88 citations per patent, at the high end it is 2.65 for Biotechnology, 1.87 for Pharmaceuticals, at the low end 0.18 for Construction/Building and 0.22 for Consumer Goods.
16. Between 1995 and 2001 Germany was in third place in terms of the purchase of companies by foreign buyers, after the United States and the United Kingdom (cf. Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard, op. cit.).
17. The increase in turnover between 1995 and 2001 was 83 per cent in companies with majority foreign ownership conducting R&D (calculated on the basis of SV Wissenschaftsstatistik data), or 58 per cent in all companies in which foreign firms had a share of at least 10 per cent in terms of voting rights/capital (calculated on the basis of data from the German Bundesbank on international capital integration, various years
18. For this analysis, the original sample of 47 companies had to be reduced due to lack of comprehensive data for all companies.
19. The research intensity figures (R&D personnel in relation to number employed) were calculated for the most research-intensive companies in Germany (about 1,000) with German and foreign majority shareholders.
20. These sectors each have higher shares of the total R&D expenditures by foreign companies in Germany than in those by German companies.
21. Technically, this was done by subtracting the so-called Relative Technological Advantage (RTA) of the global activities (overall patents of the sample) in a given field from the RTA f of the activities in Germany (German patents) of the sample of foreign MNEs. For methodological details, see Edler et al. (2003), as well as Chapter 1 ('specialisation').
22. This is based on the assumption that companies with foreign majority ownership also have research locations abroad, which exchange knowledge with their plants in Germany. This does not apply, however, when, for example, foreign financial investors own an independent company in Germany that conducts research.
23. Cf. OECD (ed.) (2003b: Table 64).