Dispersion Of The Location Choice Of The R & D Institutions - Beijing Empirical Analysis

With the trends of globalization of economic and the rapid development of science and technology,more and more big corporations begin to decentralize their R&D organizations in order to gain the R&D resources throughout the country even in the world region. Without surprising,these decentralized R&D units which are set outside the locations of their mother companies always cluster in some special regions.From the aspect of R&D strategies,we analyze the reasons for decentralization of R&D units of a company. We conclude six motivations related with the technology and three factors related with the market. In addition,we summarize three different functional types of those decentralized R&D units and also three types of organizational structure of those units.The most important decision in decentralized R&D organizations is the locations of the units. In this article,we discuss the location considerations of the decentralized R&D units from two aspects-from the micro-level and the meso-level. From the aspect of micro-level,we discuss the three most important factors related with the R&D resources of objective region. From the aspect of meso-level,we conclude six factors of R&D environment supporting system. Then we initiatively advanced two models,one concludes the factors that the mother corporations should consider when they decide where to locate their decentralized R&D units. These factors are also important to those regions that want to improve their regional technology competence by attracting R&D organizations outside the region. The other model is to evaluate the attraction of a region to the companies outside the region for setting their decentralized R&D units in this region. The latter one model could also be used in benchmarking for a region to improve its regional R&D conditions.We choose Beijing City and its R&D units set by ecdemic big corporations as our research objects. The hypothesis that we figured is proved by the analysis of 103 R&D units. We also complete the empirical research of the regional attraction model in Beijing by interviewing 30 decentralized R&D units. Based on our analysis,suggestions are made to improve the R&D conditions of Beijing City.