This paper investigates the relationship between home and offshore R&D activities on the knowledge production of the investing home region. Debate is ongoing on whether R&D offshoring complements the R&D performed at home. In the light of increased offshoring of innovative activities to emerging...

This paper analyses the restructuring of technological capabilities following M&A-based growth in large industrial firms with a substantial technological knowledge base. In particular, we focus on the restructuring of those technological capabilities that are of a general purpose kind (namely...

R&D offshoring has increasingly involved emerging countries as host locations and promoted a greater fragmentation of R&D activities across borders. As a result, a subtle international division of labor in knowledge production has yielded a fine-slicing of R&D activities with the highest...

This paper shows empirically that in an intra-industry oligopolistic scenario the location of a firm’s innovative activities plays an important role in determining its partner selection in R&D alliances. Such a role is mainly attributed to a strategic use of R&D alliances as a means to limit...

The paper aims at investigating how far transaction costs economics (TCE) concurs in the explanation of outsourcing decisions in firms characterized by “thick’ industrial relations, that is where unions and employees are involved in, and are sometimes able to affect, the relative managerial...

The paper aims at ‘embedding’ the outsourcing firm by considering it as a four-fold unit of analysis: i.e. as an organizational, production, industrial and innovation unit. Theoretical correlations between outsourcing decisions and outsourcing variables are formulated and then tested with...