The Evolution of Corporate R&D Strategy in a World Leading Bicycle Company (1972∼2016): A Longitudinal Study

The research and development (R&D) activities are critical to firms' growth, but previous studies provide fewer holistic evidences of aligning corporate strategies with R&D strategies. This study is to investigate how to align corporate strategies with R&D strategies that transform an internationalized company. Moreover, this study also investigated that how companies build up their technical capability to transform from a private domestic company to a public and global corporation. Longitudinal study is applied to the world largest, global bicycle company by tracking its history from the beginning establishment to present achievement. Interviews with CTO and internal documentation are used to analyze the alignment between the corporate strategies and R&D strategies. The results indicate that the co-evolution between corporate strategies and R&D strategies conduces to the process of firms' R&D internationalization. The process of internationalization of this bicycle company provides a referable model for companies who are searching for the way to transform their R&D organizations for the future. The evidences also provide some implications to OEM, ODM, OBM, and R&D transformation in different stages of industrial development of Taiwan.