R&D Internationalization Strategies of the World’s Top Corporate R&D Investors

This paper examines how multinational enterprises (MNEs) internationalize their R&D activities. We address three questions: (1) What determines the level of R&D internationalization? (2) What strategies dominate home-base-augmenting (HBA), home-base-exploiting (HBE), technology-seeking (TS), or market-seeking (MS)? And (3) What are the patterns in strategy mixes? We merge data on 2,000 global research leaders (2012–2014) with the EPO PATSTAT database, covering roughly 1,700 top corporate R&D investors and their patenting. We find that about one-fifth of these investors concentrate their patent-relevant R&D domestically. Our results indicate that leading R&D performers use offshoring primarily to acquire complementary technological knowledge (HBA) and to leverage home-based technological strengths for market expansion (HBE). The increasing proportion of HBA strategies in the late 2010s highlights the growing importance of international knowledge exchange, suggesting that the rise of foreign R&D locations does not undermine national innovation systems.