This Battelle-R&D Magazine report on international research and development trends sees China's race into R&D as the modern day equivalent of the Cold War.
Global competition, once defined by the Cold War arms race, has evolved into a 'head and brains race' where nations measure success through the development and application of technology.
Well, you have to grab the reader's attention. This news release from Battelle certainly does that. It describes a Battelle-R&D Magazine report (available as a PDF file from the news release) on international research and development trends which "frames international competition as evolving from the arms race to a 'hands race' based on lower-cost manual labor and now to the head and brains race driving the current escalation of R&D spending".
They have asked companies a bunch of questions, on why the outsource their R&D for example. The most important reason seems to be the "Lower cost [Science & Engineering] talent". The least important is that you have to outsource R&D to do business locally.
It would be interesting to see these how numbers vary between business sectors. Some of the companies operating in China, for example, the most attractive place to invest in R&D, see it as very important to do some R&D there because they want to do business in the country. Chinese consumers, they argue, don't like the idea of just having technology shipped in from abroad. Their tastes, sometimes literally, are such that only the locals know how to meet them.
Perhaps this explains why the most popular R&D activity for outsourcing is product development. Basic research and process development, the two functions that really determine a company's future direction, are at the bottom of this list.
More than half the businesses questioned said that spending money abroad had led to a reduction of US R&D staff and budget. US? What about the rest of the planet?
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