The globalization has been the driving force for enterprises to go international with both challenges and opportunities. The mutual interests of international cooperation in market expansion, technological advancement, cost-effectiveness, and business dynamics have been attractive to both fast-developing and well-established corporations. With the strong support of favorable policies of China’s government, hi-tech industries such as pharmaceuticals have actively established and are steadily expanding their cooperation with the leading foreign enterprises. In this process of innovation we see the bilateral flows of pharmaceutical knowledge in forms of cross-organizational and cross-country knowledge transfer and retrieval as important catalysts for further development.
The research on knowledge transfer and retrieval of pertinent information has tended to emphasize the importance of local networks and inner-corporate collaboration, which has been regarded as the principal source of technological dynamism. More recently, however, strong inter-enterprise and international connections to outside knowledge sources and partners have been challenging the existing paradigm and point to other perspectives of research in knowledge retrieval and transfer. The purpose of this project is to examine how knowledge retrieval, preservation and transfer works in the context of international cooperation and innovation of high-tech corporations on both sides, and secondly to examine how it works toward knowledge innovation of the partners that are involved, especially on China’s side.