During the past decade, multinational companies (MNCs) have made radical institutional changes: instead of generating research and development (R&D) knowledge solely in central laboratories in home countries, they have shifted their strategy to developing the capability to absorb and utilize cutting-edge technologies worldwide. Based on over 80 interviews with mainly electronics and pharmaceutical companies in Europe, Japan and the United States, this presentation addresses the question: How have MNCs developed their capability to evaluate, internalize, and utilize external R&D knowledge from abroad? Still a work in progress, this research provides an understanding of the evolutionary process of internationalization of R&D as well as the various strategies of Japanese and European high technology MNCs to absorb new technologies from US and Europe.

Biography: Seiko Arai is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, UK, and currently a visiting scholar at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University. She obtained a bachelor's degree in law and political science from the University of Tokyo, Japan, and a Masters in public policy from Harvard University. She has worked for the Japanese government and the headquarters of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), France, in the areas of science and technology and education policies.

The goal of this conference/workshop is to bring together a high level group of economists, political scientists and business economists to discuss the future agenda of economic policy. The interventionist approach to economic policy has been abandoned for a more market type agenda in the nineties, however to a different degree across the countries in the triad. Governments and constituencies continued to be faced by old problems, and additionally were challenged by new ones. The conference investigates whether there is a common agenda in the US, Europe, and East Asia, how far priorities about objectives and consensus about instruments exist, and whether this set of goals and instruments will lead to consensus or conflict in the global economy. Participation is by invitation only, and intensive discussion and communication gets the priority over long papers and a large audience.