臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.29 NO.1

Choose Foreign R&D Partners From Right Pools: A Synthesis Framework 110 3. Research Methods 3.1 Data and Sample This study uses a unique firm-level data set of overseas investments of Taiwanese manufacturing firms to empirically test the hypotheses. Enormous changes in the industrial environments, e.g., the emphasis on the environmental protection, increasing land and labor costs, and fluctuations in the local Taiwanese currency emerging in the late 1980s, have forced many labor-intensive firms to move their productions overseas. Specifically, to meet the requirements of being a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Taiwan deregulated its regulatory policy enforced in the electronics industry regarding the investments in China in 2001, which resulted in a substantial upsurge in FDI. 1 For instance, the annual amount of outward FDI increased from US$1.97 billion in 1992 to US$13.14 billion in 2012; 2 the high growth rate reveals that Taiwanese firms have been actively investing in foreign markets to meet the challenges of economic globalization. The technologies from the developed countries, e.g., the USA, Japan, and Germany, are often advanced and even those countries are regarded as the technology exporters; firms from the developed countries go abroad more for exploring new markets rather than acquiring new technologies. As such, sampling firms from the developed countries may lead our hypothesis testing to be difficult due to less differentiation in the strategic motives and the learning strategies among firms. In contrast to most of the extant research of internationalization or R&D collaboration that sampled firms from the developed countries, e.g., the USA and Japan, we sampled firms from the emerging economies, i.e., Taiwan, for testing the effects of different strategic motives and learning strategies on the firms’ decisions of R&D partner selection. Firms from the emerging economies often face the constraints of limited home market sizes and the bottlenecks of technologies; these problems force firms to seek for new markets and new technologies overseas. By sampling firms from Taiwan, this study can complement the current research stream with diverse samples of more heterogeneous motives and strategies. 1 For the development of Taiwan’s outward FDI policy, please refer to Yang, Wu, and Lin (2010). 2 These numbers can be found in the World Investment Report 2016.