Managing Global Innovation ― Uncovering the Secrets of Future Competitiveness

If R&D and innovation in the 1990s were about more internationalization, more corporate entrepreneurship, and more information-integration, then the 2000s have been about consolidating and expanding these trends further: more globalization including the technology mavericks of China and India, more open and inbound innovation integrating external technology providers, and more web- and Intern- enabling of innovation processes by involving R&D contributors regardless of their location. The corporate R&D powerhouses of the 1980s are now mostly history. Even where they survived, they had to yield to corporate efficiency efforts and business-wide integration programs. Still, it would be unfair to belittle them in retrospect as they have found new roles in corporate R&D and innovation n- works. In fact, the very successes of centralized R&D organizations of the 1970s and 1980s made possible the revolution of globalized innovation that we have been witnessing since the 1990s. The first two editions of Managing Global Innovation, published in 1999 and 2000, were testimonials of an increasingly internationalizing world of innovation and R&D. In this third edition of Managing Global Innovation, we have retained the basic structure of two conceptual parts (I and II) and three case study parts (III, IV, V). However, we have greatly revised all chapters, including the final “Imp- cations” chapter (part VI), and incorporated new chapters and cases that illuminate and describe the recent trends in the context of the beginnings of global innovation in the 1980s and 1990s.

Maximilian von Zedtwitz is Professor of Technology and Innovation Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R. China.