A gathering storm?

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: financial performance. But this year’s study, recently released, found that multinational firms that took a global approach to research outperformed those that concentrated their research spending in their home market.

Why? “Being global and open is now necessary for innovation,” says Henry Chesbrough of the University of

California, Berkeley. Cost is only one reason (and not usually the main one, Booz argues) to have a global research presence. Another advantage is the ability to tap into pools of talent abroad. But the most important advantage is the ability to listen to, and learn from, customers in new markets.

As well as helping designers come up with products relevant to those markets, it also allows innovation to flow the other way. Indians often share mobile phones, notes Stephen Johnston of Nokia, so the handset-maker developed software to allow multiple phone-books on a single handset; this idea is now being brought to Western markets so that users can, say, separate their home and work contacts. Similarly, GE has developed low-cost medical scanners for Asian markets that are now being sold in other poor countries, too.

Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School is not fully persuaded by the arguments put forth by Mr Bhidé (who happens to be a former classmate). He thinks Chinese and Indian firms may in time “disrupt” established American companies just as personal computers challenged mainframes, and he worries about America’s education system. But he accepts Mr Bhidé’s notion that it is more useful to teach technical skills to managers and factory workers than merely to crank out more theoretical scientists.

Most importantly, Mr Christensen agrees with Mr Bhidé that there is no case for protectionism. Some techno-nationalists argue, for instance, that “American innovation” should receive preferential tax treatment or subsidies. Such proposals make little sense given the increasingly global and open nature of innovation. As Mr Chesbrough wryly puts it: “What’s good for Intel may not necessarily be good for America.”