Abstract:

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.

Key words: Chinese enterprises, Chinese overseas R&D centers, location selection, following investment

摘要：

随着经济地理学的不断发展，全球-地方尺度的重要性不断提升，针对创新活动的研究也不断扩展。其中，中国企业海外R&D中心的投资区位选择成为亟待深入研究的课题。受数据所限，现有研究或停留在微观尺度分析企业战略对R&D投资的影响，或停留在国家尺度测度科技资源、人力资源等传统的区位因素影响，而关注跟随投资且基于大规模数据库进行中国企业海外R&D中心的定量研究则相对匮乏。本文从BVD-ORBIS全球企业数据库中提取中国企业海外R&D中心的相关数据，运用空间可视化和条件Logit模型，探究其空间扩展过程和区位选择的影响因素。研究发现：①中国企业首先在邻近的中国香港、新加坡等先进区位布局海外R&D中心，之后在美国硅谷、德国慕尼黑等全球卓越中心布局；②中国企业存在跟随投资行为，倾向于在中国企业海外R&D中心集聚度高的城市设立R&D中心，以降低“外来者劣势”和“局外者劣势”，并且这种倾向在中国民营企业和中国低技术企业中更为突出；③中国企业重视投资目的地所拥有的高级别科技资源丰富程度，当地科技集群等级越高、世界级高校数量越多，就越能吸引中国企业设立海外R&D中心，但这一倾向在中美贸易冲突后有所减弱。

关键词: 中国企业, 海外R&D中心, 区位选择, 跟随投资