Division of Labour and Coordination between independent Participants in Research and Development

Not only relatively simple work routines can today be outsourced to home countries or sent abroad. Also R&D is today object for such a development. In this paper we consider the issue through the prisms of history, uncertainty, and modularity. We look at the temporal dimension of knowledge accumulation, diminishing uncertainty, applying the modularisation concept in division of labour and all that covering with sphere of globalisation and faster, cheaper and more reliable and accurate information flow are making R&D processes object for outsourcing.

We are looking at three empirical cases: 1) Open source software development, 2) Developemnt of new types of insuling, and 3) Development of new types of agricultural technologies.