Cross-Pacific internationalization of R&D by U.S. and Japanese firms

Efforts by MNCs to develop coordinated international R&D networks have taken place from different historical bases of internationalization and in the context of differing trends in the role of R&D within the corporation, as the cross‐Pacific R&D investment in leading U.S. and Japanese firms in the electronics industry shows. Japanese firms, although they espouse a strategy of ‘localization’, are establishing wholly‐owned R&D centres in the U.S. with highly specialized technology mandates that to be used by the company must be networked with their parent organizations. U.S. firms rely on joint ventures or wholly‐owned labs with a wider array of technologies that face strong pulls to a local orientation. The patterns are somewhat out of line with the models of internationalization each side is espousing.