Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-15-2007
Abstract
This paper explores issues about firm sustainability in a time of rapid global change. As a strategist and product development practitioner, I need a better understanding of how those aspects of business intersect today. They are not frequently used in the same sentence; but I believe they come together in a firm’s research & development (R&D) process. Discovery reflects Peter Ducker’s, “what a company gets paid for” (1994: 96). That translates to the products and brand value bought by a firm’s customers. As an international practitioner, I also need to know more about the effects globalization has on how managers approach strategy and planning. How do they try to see into the murky future, to make sense around resource allocation, especially for core capabilities like R&D? Based on a few preliminary interviews, practitioners could use guidance; yet scholarly theory provides conflicting insights. There is general agreement, from Coase and Penrose to the present, that innovation is necessary for firm sustainability. But there is disagreement about the virtues of ‘virtual’ vs. inhouse R&D. From a corporate perspective, this affects how managers determine what aspects of business are crucial to their firms’ longterm sustainability. From a societal standpoint, those investment decisions affect the U.S. economy by affecting how many jobs are grown or remain in the U.S.
Keywords
research and development projects
Rights
© The Author(s). Kelvin Smith Library provides access for non-commercial, personal, or research use only. All other use, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly reproductions, redistribution, publication or transmission, whether by electronic means or otherwise, without prior written permission is strictly prohibited.
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Gibbon, Beth Fitz, "Strategic Thinking For R&D Amidst Global Economic Change: Retain and Invest, Outsource....or Reinvent?" (2007). Student Scholarship. 406.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/406