arbiter
JournalsPricingAccount

R&D Internationalization Strategies of the World’s Top Corporate R&D Investors

Heike Belitz & Anna Lejpras

International Journal of Business and Management (IJBM)2026https://doi.org/10.56879/ijbm.v5i1.01article
ABDC C
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

This paper examines how multinational enterprises (MNEs) internationalize their R&D activities. We address three questions: (1) What determines the level of R&D internationalization? (2) What strategies dominate home-base-augmenting (HBA), home-base-exploiting (HBE), technology-seeking (TS), or market-seeking (MS)? And (3) What are the patterns in strategy mixes? We merge data on 2,000 global research leaders (2012–2014) with the EPO PATSTAT database, covering roughly 1,700 top corporate R&D investors and their patenting. We find that about one-fifth of these investors concentrate their patent-relevant R&D domestically. Our results indicate that leading R&D performers use offshoring primarily to acquire complementary technological knowledge (HBA) and to leverage home-based technological strengths for market expansion (HBE). The increasing proportion of HBA strategies in the late 2010s highlights the growing importance of international knowledge exchange, suggesting that the rise of foreign R&D locations does not undermine national innovation systems.

Open paper page →

Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.56879/ijbm.v5i1.01

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{heike2026,
  title        = {{R&D Internationalization Strategies of the World’s Top Corporate R&D Investors}},
  author       = {Heike Belitz & Anna Lejpras},
  journal      = {International Journal of Business and Management (IJBM)},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.56879/ijbm.v5i1.01},
}

Paste directly into BibTeX, Zotero, or your reference manager.

Flag this paper

R&D Internationalization Strategies of the World’s Top Corporate R&D Investors

Flags are reviewed by the Arbiter methodology team within 5 business days.

Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.