Does being R&D intensive still discourage outsourcing?

Being R&D intensive has traditionally been seen as an impediment to outsourcing. This study confirms that empirically this was the case for a set of manufacturing industries in The Netherlands in the early 1990s, but also shows that R&D intensity became a positive predictor for changes in outsourcing levels over the 1990s, suggesting firms in R&D intensive industries have increasingly started to rely on partnership relations with outside suppliers. This confirms the need to move the analysis from scale, opportunism and appropriation concerns to a relational perspective when studying outsourcing in R&D intensive industries.