Coordination of multinational R & D: A Swedish case study

The need to coordinate multinational R & D increases in many corporations which want to take advantages of scale, synergy and multinationality on a world-wide basis. The Swedish engineering corporation SKF has tackled this problem as an early internationalized but lately diversified corporation working in mature technologies and markets. Substantial coordination has been achieved through a heavy resource commitment in a foreign corporate R & D lab, and a subsequent build-up of a rather elaborate system for R & D management throughout the corporation. The structure and processes of the system are described, together with experiences of coordinating effects, and a project case is given. The chosen mode of coordination is finally compared with situations in other industries.