Offshoring and the Global Sourcing of Talent: Understanding the New Frontier of Internationalization

Companies in high-cost developed economies are increasingly migrating whitecollar activities at offshore low-wage locations. Recent researches confirm that firms are progressively sourcing abroad higher-skilled technical, engineering and scientific jobs. The purpose of this study is to investigate why and how companies currently offshore product development activities. We develop hypotheses on the motivations behind this higher-skilled offshoring and on the peculiar internationalization process followed. We test them on a finegrained database containing 262 offshore implementations initiated by 71 Western European companies. The results obtained confirm that the actual process of product development offshoring presents remarkable theoretical novelties that differentiate it from previous waves of internationalization.