Abstract
KEYWORDS
Automotive parts manufacturers, R&D, Lisbon strategy, research nuclei, research networks.
ABSTRACT
The apparition of the uncommon network of automotive parts suppliers in Romania, with “national specificity”, was supported by the fact that these suppliers were “historically” structured by products and not by technologies/trades. There are big plants, some of them with thousands of employers, which manufactured subassemblies for the domestic automotive manufacturers. Those plants had production capacities able to develop various industrial activities: from casting and primary processing up to assembling and validation of functional assemblies. There were developed a lot of departments with good endowment for that time, producing tools, moulds, machine-tools and other devices used for processing.
Those factories were, in fact, “Romanian clusters”, industrial integrated “bunches”, which benefited of their own R&D departments for products or processes, or they were coupled with the R&D institutions working together with the automotive manufacturers.