Managing Global Innovation

"Countries splinter, regional trading blocks grow, the global economy becomes even more interconnected. " Lester Thurow, The Future o/Capitalism, 1996 Globalization has changed the face of R&D. Local knowledge clusters are not only tapped by multinationals but by small and medium-sized companies as well. Global R&D networks speed up the evolution of technology and ask for new management concepts. The complexity is abundant: Information and communication technology creates the global village, but customers become more fickle and request their own specific produ~ts, well localized, well tuned into their present business. More and more integrated technology is needed to cope with these needs. The danger of over-engineering has never been as great as today. The question is very often not whether some new features are technically feasible but whether customers are willing to accept and pay for it. Most multinationals have just grown with these developments; most R&D organizations are what they are just because of historical reasons. Only now some global R&D patterns are emerging. Customer-focused R&D, virtual teams and dispersed R&D departments have been shaped deliberately by some large compa­ nies, with impressive success.