中国企业海外 R&D 中心的区位选择-基于跟随投资的视角

With the development of economic geography, the importance of global-local scale has been increasing and the research for innovation activities has been expanding. Therefore, the location selection of Chines enterprises overseas Research and Development (R&D) centers has become an urgent topic to be studied. Due to the limitation of data, existing studies on overseas R&D of Chinese enterprises either stay at the micro-level to analyze the influence of corporate strategy on R&D investment, or stay at the national-level to measure the traditional location factors such as scientific and technological resources and human resources. However, from the perspective of following investment, quantitative researches on Chinese enterprises' overseas R&D centers based on large-scale databases are relatively scarce. This paper extracted investment data of Chinese enterprises' overseas R&D centers from the BVD-ORBIS global enterprise database and explores their geographic expansion history, spatial distribution and influencing factors of location selection by applying spatial visualization and conditional logit model. The findings are as follows: ① Chinese enterprises' overseas R&D centers first laid out in the neighboring advanced locations such as Hong Kong and Singapore, and then in global centers of excellence such as Silicon Valley in the United States and Munich in Germany. ② The investment of overseas R&D centers by Chinese enterprises is not only an individual behavior of enterprises, but also a group choice, and there is a herding effect: on the one hand, they choose to imitate successful investment cases of predecessors to reduce risks; on the other hand, they pursue group development in destinations to reduce their "liabilities of foreignness" and "liabilities of outsidership". Therefore, they tend to follow investments in cities with a high concentration of Chinese enterprises' overseas R&D centers, and this tendency is more prominent in private enterprises and low-technology enterprises. ③ Chinese enterprises' attach great importance to the rich level of high-level scientific and technological resources in the investment place. The higher the rank of local technology clusters and the greater the number of world-class universities, the more attractive it is for Chinese enterprises to set up R&D center. However, this tendency has been weakened after the outbreak of the Sino-US trade conflict.