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This study provides theoretical and empirical insights into how firms can enhance their performance strategically and financially by integrating learning and transformational capabilities into research and development (R&D) activities based on the dynamic capabilities approach. To achieve this, the authors propose that transformational capabilities in R&D mediate the relationship between learning capabilities in R&D and competitive advantage.

Using a purposive sampling technique and standardized questionnaires, data were collected from 118 R&D and senior managers. To analyze the data, multiple regression analysis, along with SPSS PROCESS macro (Model 4), was used.

The results support the theoretical assumption that there are direct and indirect positive and significant effects between learning capabilities in R&D and competitive advantage as mediated by transformational R&D capabilities.

This study explores R&D from a dynamic capabilities perspective and suggests that learning capabilities should come first to enhance businesses’ competitive advantage. Furthermore, transformational R&D capabilities can explain the relationship between learning capabilities in R&D and competitive advantage. The authors recommend that researchers should investigate the contributions of R&D to promote competitive advantage.

Following the resource-based view, this paper aims to investigate the business performance impact of R&D–marketing integration and marketing and technical capabilities at the organization level in a non-Western context. Specifically, this work explores the mediating role of the two capabilities, while accounting for potential moderating effects and under the contingency of technological turbulence.

Survey data were collected from the paired marketing and R&D executives of 207 Japanese manufacturing companies. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results show that marketing capability – by itself and also coupled with technical capability – mediates the relationship between R&D–marketing integration and business performance, while technical capability alone does not.

This study’s subjective performance measures and cross-sectional design have inherent limitations. The exploration of antecedents and other contingency variables would provide ample scope for future research.

The findings suggest that managers need to build these two capabilities, especially marketing capability, because R&D–marketing integration by itself will not be sufficient to improve business performance.

This study provides empirical evidence for a new theoretical link through which R&D–marketing integration impacts business performance at the program level. The findings may also partially explain the mixed and conflicting results often found in past studies.

The purpose of this paper is to present a cooperation model identifying the R&D capability as the central driver of startup commercialization strategy, by which new startups can evaluate their relative R&D capability and consequently choose an appropriate commercialization strategy.

A cooperation model has been constructed, and drawing upon the patent data of 91 aluminum nitride manufacturers, the implications of R&D capability for commercialization strategy are illustrated.

The authors' analysis suggests that competitive interaction between startup innovators and established firms depends on the R&D capability of the startup innovators, which can be evaluated by patent data.

For technologically efficient firms, a high level of integration to achieve the benefits of economies of scope will lead to more profits. However, for technologically inefficient firms, maintaining a low level of integration to achieve the benefits of specialization is the better strategy.

This paper provides a simplified model which combines an evaluation of R&D capability using patent data with strategic decision making to facilitate successful commercialization in startups.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal and justify influential factors of dynamic capabilities on research organizations’ R&D and innovation performance.

Adoption of seminal D. Teece’s (1997) concept of dynamic capabilities and operationalized matrix of key performance indicators in the area of R&D and innovation allowed the construction of the strategic management model for research organizations, consequently tested by methods of statistical analysis.

The empirical findings reveal that there exists positive influence of the dynamic capabilities on research organizations’ R&D and innovation performance. Explicitly, sensing, seizing and re-configuring dimensions of dynamic capabilities have positive impact on R&D and innovation results; consequently, the peculiarities of their inter-dependencies are identified.

Delivered research is based on the investigation of Lithuanian research organizations’ dynamic capabilities and their impact on their R&D and innovation performance. Therefore, further research could be extended to foreign countries.

The model on management of research organization’s dynamic capabilities with the aim for better R&D and innovation performance is conceptualized and specified hereinafter. In the course of the research, constructed toolkit to eventually measure research organization’s R&D and innovation performance or use it as the set of key performance indicators in the benchmarking exercise is suggested.

The paper is one of the first to suggest novel application of dynamic capabilities’ view within the domain of research organizations.

While the phenomenon of R&D offshoring has become increasingly popular, scholars have mostly focused on R&D offshore outsourcing from the point of view of the client firms, who are often from an advanced country. By examining vendor firms, in this paper the authors shift the focus to the second party in the dyadic relationship of R&D offshore outsourcing. Specifically, the authors compare vendor firms with nonvendor firms from the same emerging economy and industry to look at whether vendor firms from emerging economies can improve their innovation performance by learning from their clients. The authors also look at the role of depth and breadth of existing technological capabilities of the vendor firm in its ability to improve its innovation performance.

This study is based on firm-level data from the Indian biopharmaceutical industry between 2005 and 2016. The authors use the Heckman two-stage model to control for self-selection by firms. The authors compare the innovation performance of vendor firms with nonvendor biopharmaceutical firms (group vs nongroup analysis) as well as innovation performance across vendor firms (within group comparison).

The authors find that, compared to nonvendor firms, R&D offshore outsourcing vendor firms from emerging economies have higher innovation performance. The authors argue that this higher innovation performance among vendor firms is due to learning from their clients. Among vendor firms, the authors find that the innovation gains are contingent upon the two factors of depth and breadth of the vendor firms' technological capabilities.

This paper makes three contributions: First, the authors augment the nascent stream of research on innovation from emerging economy firms. The authors introduce a new mechanism for emerging economy firms to learn and upgrade their capabilities. Second, the authors contribute to the literature on global value chains, by showing that vendor firms are able to learn from their clients and upgrade their capabilities. Third, by examining the innovation by vendor firms, the authors contribute to the R&D offshore outsourcing, which has largely focused on the client.

The study findings have important implications for both clients and vendors. For client firms, the authors provide evidence that knowledge spillovers do happen, and R&D offshore outsourcing can turn vendors into potential competitors. This research helps firms from emerging economies by showing that becoming vendors for R&D offshore outsourcing is a viable option to learn from foreign firms and improve innovation performance. Going outside geographic boundaries may be a large hurdle for these resource-strapped, emerging economy firms. Providing offshore outsourcing services for narrow slices of R&D activities may be a starting point for these firms to upgrade their capabilities.

This paper is among the first to quantitatively study the innovation performance of vendor firms from emerging economies. The authors also contribute to the nascent literature on innovation in emerging economy firms by showing that providing R&D offshore outsourcing services to client firms from advanced countries can improve firms' innovation performance.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature discussing the internationalization of research and development (R&D) among multinational companies by proposing a process description to capture the development of local R&D capabilities in subsidiaries.

The authors build the conceptualization not only on the prevailing literature on resource management, subsidiary evolution and subsidiary initiatives, but also on empirical observations.

A process in four phases is distinguished to describe the evolution of R&D capabilities in subsidiaries: the identification of an opportunity in the host country that triggers the establishment of local R&D capabilities; the gathering of support – from the host country and from MNC internally – and resources; the bundling of the resources to build capabilities; and finally the leveraging of the capabilities.

By offering a conceptualization of the process through which subsidiaries build R&D capabilities, the authors contribute to the literature on R&D internationalization that hitherto has neglected the central role played by subsidiaries and the fact that a subsidiary needs to develop and manage resources and capabilities to change its R&D related role and/or mandate within the MNC.

By providing a process perspective on MNCs internationalization of R&D focussing on the development and management of R&D capabilities at subsidiaries, the paper adds a more dynamic dimension to the previously rather static view on R&D internationalization.

Organizational innovations are closely associated with organizational knowledge, and thus a firm builds its knowledge base to enhance its innovative performance. However, insights into this process are still limited, especially in the context of firms in developing countries. Building on the dynamic managerial capabilities literature and open innovation paradigm, this paper attempts to fill this gap by developing and empirically testing a model that investigates how firms in developing countries accumulate knowledge to innovate.

A model of a firm's knowledge accumulation and innovation is proposed in which it specifies relationships among absorptive capacity, knowledge breadth, research and development (R&D), knowledge depth, exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation, and then it is empirically tested by using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique based on the surveyed data of Vietnamese firms.

The results indicate that absorptive capacity positively influences both knowledge breadth and knowledge depth, knowledge breadth positively influences R&D, R&D positively influences exploratory innovation and knowledge depth, and knowledge depth positively influences exploratory and exploitative innovation.

The study proposes an “acquire and develop” open innovation model for firms in developing countries in which firms acquire external technologies and then develop R&D (develop and design) capability to adapt acquired technologies to their local conditions to create new organizational-specific capabilities and exploratory innovation.

This study argues that external knowledge acquisition is beneficial to innovative performance of firms in developing countries via renewing their knowledge base. Furthermore, the study provides the unique evidence that novel external knowledge acquisition and internal R&D are fit to each other in the fit-as-mediation form in which novel external knowledge acquisition is mediated by R&D to positively influence exploratory innovation.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial firms (KIE) strongly rely on scientific and strategic research and development (R&D) capabilities to achieve higher performance levels. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to disentangle the effects of scientific capabilities and strategic R&D on KIE performance; and how the constituent elements of these dimensions can be configured to generate conditions for high performance.

The authors’ empirical setting involves companies that submitted projects to the Innovative Research in Small Businesses (PIPE) program in Brazil. The authors then run partial least square structural equation modeling to verify how scientific and strategic R&D capabilities influence the performance construct. Second, the authors apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify configurations that are equifinal in terms of generating superior performance.

Findings indicate a strong association between scientific capabilities and KIE performance. The configurational approach outlines the existence of multiple paths to success, but human capital stands as a core condition throughout estimations.

The authors’ assessment has implications for how KIE firms are managed according to their organizational profiles and trajectories. Also, it advances the authors’ comprehension on how entrepreneurship policies can better target these distinct profiles.

The authors’ analysis provides new evidence on the inherent complexity behind the generation of high performance in KIE when addressing their portfolios of knowledge-related capabilities. More than that, the authors were able to identify the existence of heterogeneous profiles that can equally lead to higher levels of performance.

Many companies are trying to acquire innovative technologies and relevant knowledge by sending R&D work overseas. Although recent research has been focusing on the aspects that motivate MNCs to establish offshore R&D facilities, such as cost reduction and market expansion, little is known about external or circumstantial factors influencing the performance of global R&D activities. Searching for enhancers of offshore R&D facilities, we investigated the relationships between the performance of offshore R&D and the technological capabilities of a parent company, its home country, and its R&D hosting country. Both patent data of EU and the EU R&D scoreboard of 134 overseas R&D labs from 46 MNCs, dating from the period of 2003 to 2005, are used in the analysis. The same time period is applied in calculating the RTA of each country. Regression analysis results support our main hypothesis that the technological capabilities of the parent company and the hosting country positively affect the performance of overseas R&D.