The Globalisation of Science and Technology: Collaborative Research and International Competitiveness

Science has never respected national boundaries, but the scale at which research now crosses them is genuinely new. A physicist in Bengaluru can co-write a paper with colleagues in Geneva and Tokyo without any of them leaving their desks. A pharmaceutical lab funded by a German parent company can run trials in Pune. This pooling of brains, money, and equipment across countries is what we mean by the globalisation of science and technology. It has reshaped how knowledge is produced, who funds it, and who ultimately benefits from it. Understanding this process is essential to understanding modern comparative politics, because the way states cooperate and compete in research now sits at the heart of national power.

What the globalisation of science and technology means
Why collaboration accelerated: the key drivers
The end of the Cold War
Cheaper and faster air travel
The Internet and digital communication
The evidence: co-authored publications on the rise
The evidence: foreign funding of industrial R&D
The benefits: knowledge exchange and innovation
Access to talent and ideas
Sharing costs and risks
Tackling shared global challenges
The challenges: where cooperation gets complicated
Managing intellectual property
Balancing national interest with global cooperation
The return of geopolitics
International competitiveness in a globalised world

What the globalisation of science and technology means

At its core, the globalisation of science and technology refers to the growing interconnection of research activity across national borders. It involves scientists from different countries working together, firms locating their research and development (R&D) operations abroad, and money flowing across borders to fund innovation. The phenomenon is widely regarded as one of the defining features of contemporary globalisation. Researchers describe it as the backbone of international technology transfer, with collaborative global R&D networks acting as the engine that drives the global knowledge economy.

It is useful to separate two related ideas. First, there is the globalisation of science itself, seen in joint research, shared laboratories, and co-authored publications. Second, there is the globalisation of technology and R&D, seen when companies set up research centres in foreign countries or fund innovation abroad. Both processes feed each other. The more openly scientists share knowledge, the easier it becomes for firms to tap talent wherever it exists.

Why collaboration accelerated: the key drivers

Three forces in particular pushed international research cooperation into high gear over the past few decades.

The end of the Cold War

For much of the twentieth century, scientific cooperation was constrained by ideological rivalry. The world was divided into competing blocs, and strategic knowledge was guarded jealously. The end of the Cold War loosened these constraints and opened up new partnerships between previously separated scientific communities. For India, which followed a policy of non-alignment during the Cold War to stay independent of the US- and Soviet-led blocs, the shift created room to build technology partnerships more freely with multiple powers at once.

Cheaper and faster air travel

Collaboration depends on trust, and trust is often built face to face. Falling travel costs made it easier for scientists to attend conferences, visit laboratories, and form working relationships. Researchers studying European collaboration note that falling travel costs have effectively made the academic world smaller than ever before, while mobile researchers gain a clear advantage in forming international links.

The Internet and digital communication

If air travel built the relationships, the Internet sustained them. Digital communication made it possible to run long-distance research projects in real time, something that was simply unmanageable in earlier eras. This allowed talent from anywhere to be integrated into international research teams. Fields like software and information technology benefited most, because their modular nature makes it easy to conduct R&D in many locations at once. India’s IT services sector, which built much of its early growth on remote work for foreign clients, is a direct beneficiary of this shift.

The evidence: co-authored publications on the rise

The clearest measurable sign of globalised science is the steady growth of internationally co-authored research papers. When a scientific article lists authors from institutions in more than one country, it indicates genuine cross-border collaboration.

The numbers tell a striking story. According to the OECD, only about 2% of scientific papers had authors from more than one country in 1970. By 2013, internationally co-authored work made up roughly 22% of all publications in OECD countries, and that figure rose further to 27% by 2023. For some smaller countries, in unweighted terms, internationally co-authored articles can account for as much as 60% of total output.

There is a quality dimension too, not just quantity. Studies consistently find that internationally co-authored papers are more highly cited than single-nation papers. Collaboration appears to improve the reach and impact of research, not merely its volume. This gives scientists and governments a strong incentive to keep building cross-border ties.

India figures prominently in this trend. The OECD has noted that India’s international collaboration intensity grew enough that it surpassed China’s in 2021. Indian institutions are now embedded in major programmes, including participation in 88 projects under the European Union’s Horizon research programmes.

The evidence: foreign funding of industrial R&D

The second major sign of globalisation is money. Increasingly, the firms doing research in a given country are owned by, or funded from, abroad. Subsidiaries of foreign multinationals now make a significant contribution to national R&D in many host countries, a pattern that is especially pronounced in small, open economies.

Countries like Canada and the United Kingdom illustrate this well. Both run programmes that deliberately fund collaborative industrial research with foreign partners. Canada’s National Research Council, for instance, has co-funded joint industrial R&D projects with the UK, where each country supports its own eligible participants through national funding bodies while the firms co-develop technology together. The UK, in turn, has built its strategy around well-funded collaborative partnerships with other nations, backed by some of the most generous R&D tax reliefs in the G20.

This blurring of national ownership is what makes industrial R&D genuinely global. A research centre may sit physically in Toronto or Manchester, but its funding, direction, and eventual commercial payoff may belong to a company headquartered on another continent. The same logic increasingly applies to multinational research centres established in India by global technology firms.

The benefits: knowledge exchange and innovation

Why do countries and companies embrace this model? The advantages are substantial.

Access to talent and ideas

No single country has a monopoly on talent. By collaborating internationally, researchers can pull in expertise that does not exist at home. Firms operating in capital- and knowledge-intensive sectors increasingly treat R&D alliances as a first-best option rather than a fallback, because the costs and risks of innovation have grown too large to bear alone.

Cutting-edge research is expensive. Big-science projects, from particle physics to space exploration, often exceed what any one nation can afford. Pooling resources spreads both the cost and the risk. India’s space cooperation, including joint missions and astronaut training arrangements with partners abroad, shows how collaboration can stretch a national budget further.

Tackling shared global challenges

Problems like climate change, pandemics, and clean energy do not stop at borders, so the research addressing them cannot either. International collaboration has been particularly active in areas like green technology, where the number of countries cooperating on patents has been rapidly growing. Solving these problems requires the kind of pooled effort that globalised science makes possible.

The challenges: where cooperation gets complicated

Globalised science is not a simple good-news story. It raises genuine tensions that governments must navigate carefully.

Managing intellectual property

When researchers from different countries and companies create something valuable together, who owns it? Intellectual property rights (IPR) have become the central issue of global innovation policy. In surveys of firms globalising their R&D, IPR has been flagged as a critically important challenge more often than any other issue. This is why collaborative funding programmes now routinely require partners to agree on a plan for IP rights before a single rupee, pound, or dollar is spent.

Balancing national interest with global cooperation

Here lies the deepest political tension. A country that funds research wants the economic benefit to stay at home, yet globalised R&D makes that hard to guarantee. When a government subsidises the research of a foreign-owned subsidiary, the parent company may choose to commercialise the results elsewhere, so that public money produces little payoff for the host economy. This is sometimes called a conundrum for national governments, because the same openness that fuels innovation can leak its rewards abroad.

The return of geopolitics

Recent evidence suggests the long climb in collaboration may be losing momentum. The OECD reports that international collaboration rates for the United States and the EU have remained largely flat since 2018, partly reflecting heightened geopolitical tensions. As advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and quantum computing become central to national security, states grow more cautious about who they share research with. For India, this has meant building selective, trusted partnerships, such as deepening technology ties with the United States while keeping national priorities firmly in view.

International competitiveness in a globalised world

The flip side of cooperation is competition. Even as countries collaborate, they compete fiercely to be the place where breakthrough research happens, because that is where the high-value jobs, the patents, and the strategic advantages accumulate. Studies of elite research show that the United States, the European Union, and China jostle for position in the share of the world’s most-cited publications.

This dual dynamic of cooperating and competing at the same time defines modern science policy. A nation must remain open enough to attract talent and partnerships, yet protective enough to retain the rewards of innovation. India’s strategy of joining multiple international research initiatives while investing heavily in its own institutions, from the IITs to dedicated research labs, reflects exactly this balancing act. Hosting the 2026 AI Impact Summit, for example, gives India a platform to shape global technology norms while advancing its own domestic ambitions.

What do you think? If a government’s public money funds research that ends up being commercialised abroad, is the collaboration still worth it for the host country? And as strategic technologies become tied to national security, where should India draw the line between open scientific cooperation and protecting its national interest?

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Table of Contents

What the globalisation of science and technology means 🔗

Why collaboration accelerated: the key drivers 🔗

The end of the Cold War 🔗

Cheaper and faster air travel 🔗

The Internet and digital communication 🔗

The evidence: co-authored publications on the rise 🔗

The evidence: foreign funding of industrial R&D 🔗

The benefits: knowledge exchange and innovation 🔗

Access to talent and ideas 🔗

Sharing costs and risks 🔗

Tackling shared global challenges 🔗

The challenges: where cooperation gets complicated 🔗

Managing intellectual property 🔗

Balancing national interest with global cooperation 🔗

The return of geopolitics 🔗

International competitiveness in a globalised world 🔗