LocoMotive
Localisation Motives
for R&D
in Large Companies
Documents
LOCOMOTIVE Overview on Objectives and Results
This document gives an overview on the objectives LOCOMOTIVE set out to receive and a brief description of the major results
LOCOMOTIVE Policy Recommendations
The report brings together the conclusions and recommendations derived from the core LOCOMOTIVE activities. During the course of the project, the partners have conducted a total of 42 interviews with senior managers, normally CTOs, of MNEs according to a pre-defined questionnaire and methodology developed at the beginning of the project. The interviews were then summarised for comparison and analysis. Subsequently, roundtable discussions were held in each of the regions involving representatives of MNEs, regional decision-makers and researchers. These discussions too have been summarised for comparison and analysis.
In the first part of the report (Section 3), the consensus of the conclusions and recommendations from the project as a whole are presented. These seem to apply to all regions and therefore can perhaps be taken as a general statement about what needs to be done in a regional context at the European level. Section 4 discusses recommendations that address region-specific problems but may be relevant to other regions too. A regional breakdowon of all policy-recommendations will be presented in Section 5.
In presenting these conclusions it should be borne in mind that although the work of the project was guided by academic insight, the results presented are not to be taken as research findings.
Proceedings of LOCOMOTIVE Final Conference
The aim of the LOCOMOTIVE Conference “Managing the Links: Global Trends and Regional Policies in R&D Location” held in Hamburg 5-6 June, 2007 was to provide an opportunity for a wider discussion of some of the issues. The conference brought together speakers from industrial multi-nationals, academia, regional authorities and those involved in working with these. The objective of the conference was to allow dialogue and exchange of points of view between all actors engaged in the knowledge-based economy and to reflect on the way we work together.
This short report attempts to capture in a summarised form what was presented and discussed at the conference to allow readers at least a taste of the issues raised.
Conference presentations may be Downloaded as well.
Report on LOCOMOTIVE Study Visit to Toronto
The LOCOMOTOVE consortium represents nine regions, not particularly being similar but to provide contrasting view points. However, a feature inbuilt into the project was to find a region for comparison outside the European Union. The region around Toronto, Ontario (Canada), was selected since it is both an innovation hot spot, but also considered culturally more similar to Europe than other locations in the USA or Asia. Therefore a study visit to Toronto was conducted in April 2007. The visit was organised with the help of David Wolfe, Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto at Mississauga and Co-Director of the Program on Globalization and Regional Innovation Systems (PROGRIS) at the Munk Centre for International Studies (MCIS) at the University of Toronto.
Summary of Regional Roundtables and Inputs to New Policies
This project report provides summaries from a series of regionally organized roundtables on the location motives for R&D investments. The roundtables were set to screen and comment on the main points of the project and review the facts and findings from some 60 interviews with R&D managers in eight European city-regions. The R&D managers interviewed were representing mainly large multinational enterprises (MNEs), able to influence the size and in some regional cases even the direction of R&D investments and related innovation activity in the region. The roundtables, which were conducted in seven selected regions, took place in 2006 and 2007 and were managed by the LocoMotive team in each region. Each organizing team provided inputs to this document in the form of a regional summary account.
Private Sector R&D: Global View
The Global Outsourcing of R&D has vast influence on the European Union especially as R&D investments have become a central topic on the European Agenda. As this report underlines, investments in R&D support the global economic growth and is as such beneficial to both the investing countries as well as the receiving countries. However, great care should be taken, on both the national and the industrial side, to ensure that the outsourcing of R&D is done with respect for the special circumstances under which the world is becoming increasingly global. This includes also sensitivity to economic as well cultural factors, of which the bestperforming multinational firms bear evidence through their successful outsourcing strategies.
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