The Role of Bridge Managers in Global R&D Projects

In the current competitive global business environment, global collaboration in an ecosystem becomes very important to strengthen a company's core competencies. We classify global resources into three types: knowledge resources, manufacturing resources, and deployment resources. There are several types of global knowledge resources, including offshore outsourcing in research and development (R&D), collaborative R&D, mergers and acquisitions, connect and develop activities, and licensing. This study focuses on offshore R&D, where R&D bridge managers play an important role. We clarify the role of R&D bridge managers through a case study of offshore R&D outsourcing by Japanese companies to their R&D centers in India. Although there are several studies about global R&D management from an organization's viewpoint and several studies about bridge system engineers in offshore software development, little research has been conducted on bridge managers in R&D. In this study, the roles of R&D bridge managers are characterized by a comparison between bridge system engineers and R&D bridge managers.