The Impact of Captive Innovation Offshoring on the Effectiveness of Organizational Adaptation

Elisabeth Baier, Christian Rammer and Torben Schubert

Journal of International Management, 2015, vol. 21, issue 2, 150-165

Abstract: We analyze the effects of captive offshoring of innovation activities on the firms' ability to adapt their organizational structures. Basing our arguments on the complexity theory, we use three consecutive waves of the German part of the Community Innovation Survey to test our hypotheses. We find an inverted u-shape of innovation offshoring on the effectiveness of organizational adaptability, implying an optimal threshold value of innovation offshoring. This value is 11% for the share of off shored R&D, 15% for downstream innovation activities such as local market adaptation, and 34% for design activities. We also analyze several contingency variables. In particular, we show that the costs of innovation offshoring in terms of reduced organizational adaptation are increased by a regional dispersion of the offshoring activities and strong embeddedness in onshore networks. We also show that smaller firms find it easier to deal with the management complexity induced by geographical dispersion of innovation activities.

Keywords: Internationalization; Offshoring; Innovation; Organizational adaptation; Organizational adaptability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1075425315000150
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The Impact of Captive Innovation Offshoring on the Effectiveness of Organizational Adaptation (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:intman:v:21:y:2015:i:2:p:150-165

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/601266/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 601266/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.intman.2015.03.002

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Management is currently edited by M. Kotabe

More articles in Journal of International Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().