Managing Intersecting R&D Social Communities: A Comparative Study of European `Knowledge Incubators' in Japanese and American Firms

Georg Simmel's notion of intersecting group affiliations is used to analyze the situation of European R&D personnel employed by Japanese and American corporations. The fact that foreign R&D personnel belong to multiple research communities poses strategic challenges for global firms. One notable finding concerns the issue of `competitive advantage in the basic research lab'. The traditional `ethnocentricity' of Japanese firms, while facilitating intra-firm tacit knowledge flows, may create obstacles in the ability to access and capture critical knowledge embedded in foreign innovation systems outside firm boundaries. In contrast, `explicit' US firms appear to possess a certain advantage for accessing the knowledge embedded in foreign systems of innovation.