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At the beginning of the 1980s, the top management of Ciba-Geigy declared "We have looked into the future, and it lies in Japan and South-East Asia." However, until then Ciba did not have a clue how to get at results of Japanese basic research. Though Japan's universities have long been open, most scientific papers were published in Japanese and thus difficult to access by foreign readers. Japanese technology tended not to be up for sale as much as western expertise was. The Japanese were often reluctant to license out what they considered valuable as a long term asset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of this century, China has started to fascinate everyone: everyday people and industrial corporations alike. With continuous annual growth of its GDP of more than 8% since 1978, China is changing rapidly and the world as a result is changing along with China. From 1984 to 2005, utilized Foreign Direct Investment increased at an average rate of more than 20% per year. By 2004, China had become the world's 3rd largest exporting nation after the United States and Germany (Zheng, 2006). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global collaborative research is now the well-recognized, common and definite necessity among high-technology industries world-wide, because of the following reasons. First of all, the rapidly changing advanced technologies require all participants to be constantly prepared to be competitive at the front-end of such new technologies. High-technology industries must always face the serious issue of continuous huge investment in R&D in the very competitive technology area, in order to survive and especially in order to extend and strengthen their business in the future. This is, however, becoming quite harsh for many industrial companies, who are experiencing great pressure after the breakdown of the bubble economy. In the case of Hitachi, approximately US$ 4.1 billion (consolidated figure; assuming US$ 1 = 124 Yen,) were invested in R&D during the fiscal year 1996 while the sales were US$ 68.7 billion. R&D was about 6% of consolidated sales of Hitachi Limited. However, in this period, profit percentage was much less than the R&D percentage. In 2005 and 2006, around 4.5% of consolidated sales were invested in R&D within the Hitachi Group. In the future, since competition will be more severe and advancement in technologies will become faster, it is possible that investment in R&D will become more important for the survival of industrial companies, even though their profit rate may remain small like today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Providing enabling technologies for global networking and innovation, Fujitsu is one of the catalysts for global innovation, an excellent example for global research and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SAP was founded in 1972 by five former IBM systems engineers. SAP is the world's leading provider of business software solutions. Today, more than 36,200 customers in over 120 countries run more than 96,400 installations of SAP® software — from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small and midsize enterprises to suite solutions for global organizations. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver® platform to drive innovation and enable business change, mySAP™ Business Suite solutions are helping enterprises around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unisys serves organizations in 100 countries. Their 50,000 clients around the world include financial services, banking, airlines and transportation companies, government agencies, communications providers, and other commercial market leaders. Unisys is one of a select group of companies with the broad portfolio of services, technologies, and third-party alliances needed to deliver the benefits of information management — helping clients use their information assets to enhance their competitiveness and responsiveness to customers. Their expertise in information management is founded on the strengths of our three global businesses: Consulting, outsourcing, solutions, and systems integration;Industry-leading technologies; andComprehensive services and products supporting distributed computing environments. Based on years of research and development, Unisys offers a range of powerful hardware and software technologies, including desktop, client/server, and enterprise server systems that run all the popular, open business software applications. Unisys and its predecessor companies have over a century of technology leadership, and Unisys is one of the largest holders of patents in the information technology industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Document Company, Xerox, is a leader in the global document market, providing document solutions that enhance business productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kao's corporate mission is to contribute to the wholehearted satisfaction and the enrichment of the lives of customers and employees throughout the world. We will accomplish this by drawing on our creative and innovative strengths to develop products of excellent value and outstanding performance. Fully committed to this mission, all members of Kao companies are working together as a single corporate force to win the loyalty and trust of their customers. Based on our corporate mission, Kao's activities are as follows: Ensure customers' wholehearted satisfaction worldwide;Create innovative products based on original ideas and technologies;Sustain profitable growth and respond to the trust of stakeholders;Leverage the abilities of individuals into a powerful corporate force;Encourage close harmony with the environment and the community. Kao now offers worldwide a wide range of products: Approximately 570 branded package-product items from the consumer product divisions, a wide range of chemicals from the chemical divisions for industrial and institutional uses, and high technology information storage products from the Kao Infosystems group. Kao specializes in consumer products, and chemicals and infosystems products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When new R&D labs are being set up, one of the key decisions is the choice of the first R&D director. This first director will have to be able to start a new R&D organization from scratch, establish himself — and itself — in a potentially very alien environment, and ensure the proper integration of the new lab into the global R&D organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ICT (information and communication technology)-enhanced R&D is more different from regular R&D than most people realize. Granted, R&D as we understand it already makes heavy use of telephone communication, email, videoconferencing, etc. But the deployment of ICT into R&D project and process management fundamentally changes how R&D engineers go about their work: what they do, how they do it, and with whom. The changes that the use of ICT has brought about have come slowly, but their impact has been significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In technology-intensive firms, the two most prominent factors determining the business environment are technology and customers. For the role of R&D, the balance between the two can be tricky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The top R&D spenders worldwide account for a high share of total R&D input in each of the triad nations, thus indicating the importance of (international) R&D activities carried out by multinational companies (illustrated in Table I.2.1). The significance of international R&D activities is even larger when indirect influence of these companies on small- and medium-sized enterprises is taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has become a major destination for R&D related foreign direct investment. Since the second half of the 1990s, technology-intensive multinational companies (MNCs) have explored China as a location for their R&D activities. As a market of potentially 1.3 billion customers, market-related drivers used to be very strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]