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

Choose Foreign R&D Partners From Right Pools: A Synthesis Framework 122 costly random search or even making adverse selections. The management teams are advised not to divulge fully into the detailed specifications of the foreign R&D partners in the initial stage without clarifying their foreign entry motives, identifying the suitable learning strategies, and examining the institutional completeness of host countries. Besides, the management teams need to verify if their existing knowledge/technologies are sufficient for localizing their current products/services to fit the indigenous demands of host countries before deciding the proper learning strategies. Moreover, the management teams always need to be cautious to the expropriation risks in R&D collaborations in the institutionally incomplete countries even if they have close ties with the collaborative partners. The take-for-granted trust embedded in the close relationships may be questionable. There are limitations to our research that may be further examined by future research. First, the sampled firms are from Taiwan, and most of their FDIs (66.23% in our study) are made in China. The generalization of this synthesis framework in other institutional contexts may be further verified, although we suggest that our results be applied in other contextual scenarios. Second, we follow Freeman’s (1984) idea of stakeholders to broadly group the potential R&D partners into the internal stakeholders and the external stakeholders. The future research can suggest better classifications of stakeholders or grouping methods of potential R&D collaborative partners.