The curvilinear effect of manufacturing outsourcing and captive-offshoring on firms' innovation: The role of temporal endurance

This paper aims to contribute to the open debate in the literature on the effect of global sourcing strategies on firm performance by studying the consequences of manufacturing outsourcing and captive-offshoring for the innovation capability of the firm. We grounded our hypotheses based on the outsourcing and offshoring literature and by narrowing our focus to the effects of persisting in their adoption over time. We tested our hypotheses using data from a sample of 368 manufacturing companies listed on NASDAQ stock market. The paper provides theoretical explanations and empirical findings for the inverted U-shaped influence of keeping doing captive-offshoring on new product development performance, in contrast to outsourcing, which shows a negative linear relationship. The conclusion is that managers should be aware of the consequences of outsourcing and captive-offshoring manufacturing, either in a spot manner or over a long period. They should eventually search for equilibrium between adopting captive-offshoring for too few years vs. too many years, by monitoring year by year its effects to avoid adaptation processes and corporation hollowing, and evaluate the opportunity to re-shore manufacturing.