Multinational’s global open innovation activities in emerging markets: A case of Japanese firms’collaborations with national research institutes in Thailand

This paper analyzes the management of multinational’s R&D in emerging economies, taking the case of Japanese firms’ R&D collaboration with NTSDA, Thai national research institute. A detail interview survey for two cases, Polyplastics, an engineering plastics manufacturer and Shiseido, a cosmetic company, both working together with NSTDA for R&D, reveals that there exist significant variations of motivations, scopes and outcomes of such activities. Home base exploiting type activities (Polyplastics) are easier to manage as a natural extension to home country activities, but it is important to motivate its partner to collaborate, since only exploiting local resources may not be sustainable for long time. While, home base augmenting type activities (Shiseido), a local activity has to be well coordinated in global operation at headquarter. In addition, it is difficult to see a short term benefit from such explorative activities, so that top management support becomes important to sustain such activities for certain amount of time.