Honolulu, July 23 :

While manufacturing and low-level service jobs in the US are increasingly being moved offshore, it is widely assumed that Research and Development (R&D) jobs are not. However, Asia’s rise as an important location for outsourcing has begun to challenge these ideas.

Dieter Ernst, a senior fellow at the East-West Centre, says Asia’s emergence in innovative offshoring not only challenges these ideas but also ‘sense of complacency they have engendered’.

A newly published study, “Innovation Offshoring: Asia’s Emerging Role in Glo-bal Innovation Networks”, notes that ‘innovation offshoring is driven by profound changes in corporate innovation management as well as by the globalisation of markets for technology and knowledge workers.’

Ernst analyses the forces behind the growing geographical mobility of innovation and shows that “the US companies are at the forefront of this trend, experimenting with new

approaches”.