Technology Management with a Global Perspective: The Case of IMS

The intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS) initiative is the world´s only international multilateral collaborative R&D programme comprising Australia, Canada, the EU and Norway, Japan, Korea, Switzerland and the US. It provides a global framework for industry and academia to cooperate on manufacturing R&D throughout the full innovation cycle and to identify partners world-wide. The programme´s scheme for the protection of intellectual property has proven to be beneficial to industrial participants, particularly for small and medium-sized companies, for engaging safely in global collaborations. Surveys among participants in IMS projects show that such international collaboration proves beneficial beyond the mere R&D activity as it includes knowledge exchanges on business and market developments as well as extended business collaborations and better cross-cultural understanding. The European part of the IMS initiative between 1995 and 2005 was managed under the European Commission´s research Framework Programmes 4, 5 and 6. Since the beginning of IMS, 37 R&D projects have been launched, most of them with European participation. These projects involve more than one thousand companies and research institutions world-wide and represent an international commitment level of around euro 400 million (with euro 100 million being European by the European Commission´s research Framework Programmes). The paper aims to describe the institutional and managerial mechanisms of this globally unique programme and to present a first assessment of its impact and scope for improvement, mainly from a European perspective