KnowledgeLink Newsletter

Bob Stembridge
Thomson Scientific
March 2007

With comparatively low costs and a dramatic increase in the graduate-educated labor force, coupled with an ambitious five year plan to transition from a manufacturing to innovation-based economy, China is proving to be something of a magnet for globalization of R&D. A continental drift eastwards towards the Asia Pacific region is in progress.

Introduction
International boundaries have today become considerably less important in how R&D activities are structured, and in how collaboration between research groups occurs — particularly in the light of recent advances in information and communication technologies. Organizations are also reaching beyond their home borders as a way of addressing:

• rising R&D costs
• risks in product development
• shortened product life cycles
• increasing multidisciplinary complexity of technologies
• intense competition in domestic and global markets.

These factors together have led to increased globalization of R&D, with China in a pivotal role.

Metrics of R&D growth

In order to understand the level of R&D activity of a region, there are a number of measures we can examine:

• R&D spend
• Numbers of researchers involved in R&D
• Number of scientific papers published in scholarly journals
• Number of inventions described in patent applications

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