A study for MNC’s internship-type R&D in China

Research and development is essential to an enterprise’s growth, and how to manage R&D from a global perspective is an important issue faced by multinational companies (MNCs). The mainstream of R&D activities in China is said to consist of industry-academy partnerships. This paper introduces the case study of a unique industry-academy R&D partnership initiated by an MNC and proposes a new model of industry-academy partnership. Since the case of Company is not a simple industry-academy partnership but has unique characteristics in its methods of selecting and managing R&D subcontractors, we have called it an “internship-type industry-academy partnership.” As a result of this approach, three traditional missions of the university — education, research, and guidance — are handled by the MNC. We called this “project-based education.” Truly, under this approach the MNC contributes to human-resources development on behalf of the Chinese university. In addition, since the MNC also can obtain new knowledge and technologies through utilization and development of superior human resources, this form of industry-academy partnership can be said to have successfully achieved a true win-win relationship.