R&D Outsourcing Organization Theory

With the development of outsourcing, more and more enterprises have partly or totally outsourced their important businesses to suppliers, which leads to the emergency of R&D outsourcing. R&D outsourcing has merged into the global economic chain as a new technological innovative method and become a popular topic.This paper takes economics, complementary theory, product system architecture and patent protection theory to analyze R&D outsourcing organization models by establishing dynamic game model and static comparative analysis method. This thesis tries to answer the following research questions: (1) R&D outsourcing control and incentive contradiction. (2)How to outsource? (3) How to develop a effective R&D outsourcing contract? This paper explores these issues by three sub-researches.The first sub-research takes property right perspective to explore a range of issues of R&D outsourcing mechanism. By establishing a dynamic game model, we find that the second-best level investment of R&D is less than the first-best level of investment for both parties; At the second-best level of investment, the product with greater potential value should be developed under the ownership structure that renders a higher likelihood of success. Besides, the R&D cycle should be based on the average replacement time in the industry. Enterprises will choose ownership structure with higher likelihood of success according to the comparison between R&D cycle and the industry benchmark.The second sub-research takes the framework of principal-agent model to analyze the influence of behavior traits,project property and information leakage on the choice of payment contract of R&D outsourcing. The results show that without information leakage, the principal can use fixed lump-sum payment contract to select R&D agent when the efforts of the agent are observable, but should use revenue-sharing contract to undertake the R&D outsourcing when the efforts are unobservable. More over, the sharing revenue will be negatively related to the agent's risk aversion, market uncertainty and the agent's R&D efficiency .In the context of information leakage, the sharing revenue will be negatively associated to the project importance to the principal, and the complexity of the project. Also, the principal should adjust its revenue sharing ratio in accordance with the agent's capability of capturing the leaking market.The third sub-research first examines the equilibrium investments by the outsourcing firm and research unit under first and second best conditions, shows the impact of self-investment and cross-investment on the R&D outsourcing decision, and further investigates the roles of human capital and materialized assets in R&D outsourcing mechanism, and draws conclusion that the R&D outsourcing strategy should be based on the properties of specific asset investment so as to achieve best innovation effects. The results indicate that the ownership should be allocated to the party with higher cross-investment elasticity, and human capital investment is important in R&D outsourcing project.