THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF R&D ACTIVITIES TO ASIAN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

In the actual scenario firms not only produce and sell, but increasingly also develop goods and services outside their home countries. Moreover today, it seems to be the rule, not the exception, that these firms have R&D activities at different locations inside and outside their home country. In the recent years the interest in the developing Asian countries has grown a lot and firms from almost all over the world have considerably extended their R&D activities in the developing Asia. The goal of this paper is to show R&D internationalization activities of firms from Italy in Asian developing countries. We use a dataset of 500 Italian firms with international R&D units in order to understand whether companies follow a knowledge augmenting or knowledge sourcing strategy. The results show a positive relation between the choice to settle R&D units in Asia and the sale of innovative products in Asia; in this sense the conclusion is that these firms follow a knowledge exploiting strategy, establishing their whole innovation value chain to developing Asian countries.