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NEC top management determined that semiconductors would be the company’s most important “core product”. It entered into myriad strategic alliances – over 100 as of 1987 – aimed at building competencies rapidly and at low cost. In mainframe computers, its most noted relationship was with Honeywell and Bull. Almost all the collaborative arrangements in the semiconductor-component field were oriented toward technology access. As they entered collaborative arrangements, NEC’s operating managers understood the rationale for these alliances and the goal of internalizing partner skills. NEC’s director of research summed up its competence acquisition during the 1970s and 1980s this way: “From an investment standpoint, it was much quicker and cheaper to use foreign technology. There wasn’t a need for us to develop new ideas.”
