Institutional Influences on R&D Collaboration in China

The paper outlines why collaboration between foreign invested R&D units and local universities in China often fails. R&D collaboration projects in China easily go off-track. The cases show that these challenges can be overcome if managers supervise employees and partners in a manner that simultaneously builds trust in the sequence of affect-based trust followed by cognition-based trust. Thereby, good results can be created in collaboration with Chinese universities. The paper illustrates institutional influences on R&D collaboration between foreign invested R&D and local universities in China, and thus provides insights as to why such collaborations fail, and how these failures can be avoided.