Foreign ownership and R&D networks: Geographic and organizational proximity in R&D cooperation

Foreign direct investment (FDI) enables firms to leverage the extensive international networks of foreign investors, potentially gaining a competitive advantage over domestic-owned firms and assuming distinct roles in R&D cooperation. To explore the effect of foreign ownership on firms’ choice of R&D partners, this study focuses on two key dimensions of R&D cooperation—partners’ location and group membership—and two aspects of R&D networks—the breadth and depth. Partners’ location investigates the geographic proximity between cooperating partners, while a shared business group membership fits the concept of organizational proximity. Using the biennial R&D survey from 2001 to 2017 conducted in Belgium, we find that foreign-owned firms are more likely to engage in various configurations of R&D cooperation than domestic-owned firms and maintain more extensive R&D networks, with a particular preference for international and intra-group cooperation. The findings indicate that foreign ownership helps to transcend geographic proximity but constrains firms to organizational proximity in R&D cooperation, thus reshaping the R&D cooperation landscape for firms.