Building new Knowledge Networks: A Europe–China Perspective on R&D Offshoring

This paper explores how offshoring of R&D affects innovation performance based on three recent cases of R&D transfer from Scandinavia to China. One globally leading packaging company moved R&D to China and immediately arranged innovation competitions between three selected universities in order to improve their innovation performance within distribution equipment. Two other Scandinavia originated companies – now global leaders within robotics and diabetes treatment – did on the other hand not co-operate as closely with local universities when they transferred R&D to China – and captured less innovation performance. By combining theories on ambidexterity, knowledge transfer and networking, a theoretical framework is developed to analyze the different strategies for local knowledge network interaction that are deployed by the case companies. The analysis suggests that close interaction and cross-fertilization with local knowledge networks are of eminent importance if newly established R&D offsprings are to improve overall innovation performance.