Technology Management with a Global Perspective: The Case of IMS

The intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS) initiative is the world's only international multilateral collaborative R&D programme comprising Australia, Canada, the EU and Norway, Japan, Korea, Switzerland and the US. It provides a global framework for industry and academia to cooperate on manufacturing R&D throughout the full innovation cycle and to identify partners world-wide. The programme's scheme for the protection of intellectual property has proven to be beneficial to industrial participants, particularly for small and medium-sized companies, for engaging safely in global collaborations. Surveys among participants in IMS projects show that such international collaboration proves beneficial beyond the mere R&D activity as it includes knowledge exchanges on business and market developments as well as extended business collaborations and better cross-cultural understanding. The European part of the IMS initiative between 1995 and 2005 was managed under the European Commission's research Framework Programmes 4, 5 and 6. Since the beginning of IMS, 37 R&D projects have been launched, most of them with European participation. These projects involve more than one thousand companies and research institutions world-wide and represent an international commitment level of around euro 400 million (with euro 100 million being European by the European Commission's research Framework Programmes). The paper aims to describe the institutional and managerial mechanisms of this globally unique programme and to present a first assessment of its impact and scope for improvement, mainly from a European perspective