Quote Originally Posted by bmolsson
Actually, you can purchase R&D from abroad. In the age of multinational corporations, this is not necessarily a problem. The Japanese have been very successful absorbing up ideas and patents around the globe and then commercialize them.
The real problem is if there are not risk capital available to commercialize the result from research.
Not really. Good R&D is not a commodity. It takes awhile to build up a working structure. You can't go turning it off and on like a spigot, and that is what outsourcing tries to do. The outsourcing efforts are part of the commoditization of everything. Research is not a commodity, it is the long range strategic arm of business.

I have great respect for the Asians I've worked with: intelligent hard workers and good people. However, there was something missing from their business/societal culture when it came to R&D in my field (and I see considerable evidence of the same in other fields.) Rather than throwing out a bunch of ideas/explanations of why, I will simply say that in comparing results, R&D money was better spent in our U.S. operations.