Professor Yuko Aoyama of Clark University’s Graduate School of Geography has received an award from the National Science Foundation for her research, The Global Shift in R&D Alliances: MNEs & the Quest for the BOP markets. The award comprises $269,999 over three years.
The research will examine how multinational enterprises (MNEs) are devising new ways to access market intelligence by forging alliances with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and develop case studies of organizational innovation in emerging economies and bottom- of-pyramid (BOP) markets. In particular, Aoyama and Balaji Parthasarathy of the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, will focus on the emerging phenomenon of research and development (R&D) alliances between MNEs and NGOs, and analyze the significance of global corporate R&D activities in five metropolitan areas in India.
Aoyama’s research also aims to develop a new conceptual framework that explicitly recognizes innovation in interactions between technological knowledge and market intelligence — how MNEs and NGOs co-innovate, co-develop and nurture knowledge assets, in spite of competing incentive structures, institutional objectives, and organizational cultures, requires not only new solutions to multidimensional coordination problems, but a new conceptual framework of possibly a new form of market governance. Emerging collaborations between for-profit and nonprofit entities will provide new insights into and evidence of emerging trends in capitalism and development, and will contribute to broader debates on the transformation, and the diversity, of capitalism.
Through this international collaborative effort between institutions in the U.S. and India, Aoyama and Parthasarathy aim to foster an intellectual dialogue about the involvement of global forces in shaping the future of the Indian economy.
Professor Aoyama is an economic/industrial geographer with expertise in global economic change, technological innovation, industrial organization, and cultural economy. She has been awarded an Abe Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, as well as research grants from the National Science Foundation (Geography and Spatial Science and Economics Programs), National Geographic Society, and the Association of Asian Studies. She is an editor-in-chief of Economic Geography. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
