Impact Factors On Performance Of Reverse Technology Flow Of Overseas R&D Centers: A Process Perspective

In the 1960 s,there began a trend of establishing overseas R&D centers among multinational corporations from developed countries.In the past,overseas R&D centers were only focused on meeting needs of the host country's local market.However,nowadays,the overseas R&D centers built by multinational corporations in other developed countries aim to acquire new knowledge to enhance the technical capabilities,thereby finding a source of future competitiveness for multinational companies and even for home countries(Kuemmerle,1999;Pearce,1999).The establishment of overseas R&D centers is increasingly becoming an important way for multinational companies to acquire leading technologies,achieve R&D globalization and enhance global competitiveness.With the continuous deepening of China's Reform and Opening Up and the proposal of the“Belt and Road” Initiative(BRI),the ideas of“innovation-driven development” and“accelerating the construction of an innovative country” have become major strands in China's economic development strategy.In recent years,more and more Chinese enterprises actively“go abroad”to set up overseas R&D centers,realizing reverse technology flow,namely tracking and acquiring leading technologies from host countries and share the acquired technology with domestic headquarters,enhancing their technological and national innovation capabilities.The thesis defines the flow of technology along the path from the host countries to overseas R&D centers as initial phase.Following this,technology flows along the path from overseas R&D centers to domestic headquarters is defined as final phase.The influencing factors on reverse technology flow performance are the focus of academia and enterprises.To solve this problem,the thesis reviews the existing literature,proposing to study the factors influencing the performance of reverse technology flow from the process perspective.On the one hand,it is a breakthrough in the existing research perspective;on the other hand,it realizes the two-phase research on reverse technology flow.To the enterprise practice,it is of great practical significance to better manage the reverse technology flow process and optimize the resource allocation of multinational companies for overseas R&D centers,so as to improve the efficiency of reverse technology flow.There are totally seven chapters in this thesis,which follow the logic of "asking questions--solving problems" to arrange the content.In the first chapter,the introduction explains the research background and raises the research questions.Then the second chapter is aim to find a angle to solve and decompose the question through reviewing the literature on this field.With the method of literature analysis(chapter 3),simulation research(chapter 4)and questionnaire survey(chapter 5 and chapter 6),the thesis successfully perform research on influencing factors of reverse technology flow of overseas R&D centers.Chapter 7,the last chapter,gives conclusions and policy suggestions.By reviewing literature,this paper finds that technology senders and technology receivers as well as the relationship between them have received relatively more attention by scholars when studying on the influencing factors on reverse technology flow performance.Thus the research perspective needs to be further expanded.Based on the theory of knowledge transfer,knowledge transfer is a process,which is affected by factors such as knowledge sender,knowledge receiver,transfer context,transferred knowledge,transfer channel and motivation of the participants.Therefore,it is reasonable to regard the reverse technology flow as a process,and then discusses the influence of the four factors alike in the process,namely,flow context,the flowed technology,flow channel and motivation of the participants.Through theoretical analysis,a two-phase four-factor(2P-4F)research framework for reverse technology flow is constructed.In order to explore the specific impact of these factors,the paper first performs a simulation study to the four impact factors.Based on the research framework of 2P-4F,reverse technology flow process is deeply analyzed.The system model of the reverse technology flow 2P-4F is built on Vensim PLE software with the method of system dynamics,and then the sensitivity analysis of the influence of four factors is carried out.The results show that the initial stage is more sensitive to the change of the four factors than the final stage,and the importance of the four factors to reverse technology flow ranks from high to low as following: flow channel,technology,motivation and flow context.In terms of specific influence,both motivation and flow channel(mainly referring to formal flow channel)have positive influence.The short-term drive of the former is stronger,while the long-term influence of the latter is more stable and powerful.The observability(expressiveness)of technology and team dependence have positive and negative effects respectively,and team dependence is more decisive in the long run.The negative influence of flow situation is not obvious in the short term,and is weak in the long term.In order to verify and enrich the simulation results,the paper built the PLS-SEM path model on the basis of the survey data of Chinese samples for empirical analysis.The empirical results tests the influence of technology,flow channels and motivation on the performance of reverse technology flow,indicating that the influence of these three factors also conforms to the general practice of reverse technology flow for Chinese overseas R&D centers.For the flow context,it has a significant negative impact on the initial stage performance,but has no significant negative impact on the final stage performance,which is different from the simulation results.The paper draws following conclusions:Firstly,the negative influence of flow context on the performance of reverse technology flow is not absolute.In general,compared with the other three factors,flow situation does not play a key role.Secondly,the greater the degree of technology dominance,the higher the observability and expressiveness,and the lower the team dependency,the easier it is to achieve reverse technology flow.Thirdly,compared with the other three factors,flow channel,especially the formal flow channel,has the most critical long-term influence on the performance of reverse technology flow.The higher the frequency of use,the more favorable the reverse technology flow will be.Fourthly,the positive influence of motivation is more conducive to the rapid realization of reverse technology flow than the other three factors in the short term.Fifth,the initial stage of reverse technology flow is the key to the whole process,and it is more sensitive to the change of influencing factors.According to the above conclusions,we know that the initial stage plays a decisive role in reverse technology flow and is highly sensitive to the change of influencing factors.Therefore,the following suggestions are made from four aspects of flow situation,technology,flow channel and motivation for the initial phase,where technology acquisition practice of overseas R&D centers happens:Try to overcome the obstacles caused the differences of flow context(culture and language)but not let them be one reason for giving up the overseas R&D investment.Train or introduce talents in the form of team to improve the possibility of the inflow of implicit technology.Summarize and explore more useful flow channels,and copy and promote the useful channels,so as to guarantee the channel of reverse technological flow.The last but not the least,stimulate and enhance the motivation of technology acquisition and sharing,and quickly realize the reverse technology flow.The innovation points of the thesis are as following:(1)From the process perspective,the research framework of influencing factors of reverse technology flow performance is constructed,which is a break to the existing research perspectives and also realizes the two-stage research on reverse technology flow.Prior research has done much on factors of receiver,sender and the relationship between them.While,the thesis takes reverse technology flow as a process inspired by related research on knowledge transfer.From the perspective of process,the paper develops one research framework of two phases four factors.Because reverse technology flow in this research is defined as two stages,the research also realizes the two-stage research on overseas R&D activities.(2)Sensitive analysis of influencing factors is conducted with the method of system dynamic on Vensim PLE software,which puts forward a new sight to understand the reverse technology flow process.In the simulation study of the influencing factors,the internal process of the reverse technology flow is systematically analyzed,including the two-stage connection problem,which helps further understand the process of the reverse technology flow.Through sensitivity analysis,the long-term and short-term effects of various factors are studied in the simulation environment,which is conducive to a deeper understanding of the reverse technology flow process.(3)Empirical research on Chinese overseas R&D centers,which enriches the research conclusions and also enriches the related research on Chinese sample.The empirical study on Chinese samples shows that the flow context has a significant negative influence on the initial stage performance,but there is no significant relationship between it and the final stage performance,which is not completely consistent with the conclusion of sensitivity analysis.However,compared with the other three factors,the flow context does not play a critical role,which is consistent with the results drawn by sensitive analysis.On the other hand,a review of existing studies shows that more and more scholars have begun to pay attention to the reverse technology flow of Chinese overseas R&D centers.To some extent,this study enriches the existing literature.Future research could be continued as the following ideas: One is to explore the possible interaction among the influencing factors and further understand the internal process of reverse technology flow.The second one is to track some Chinese overseas R&D centers from a long term,and expands the survey samples of Chinese overseas R&D centers,so that to dynamically study the reverse technology flow based on first-hand data.