Over the last decade outsourcing has become an important strategic issue for manufacturer's rising pressure to reduce costs and time-to-market. This has led to outsourcing not only of traditional non-core functions such as high technology business and sunrise industry, but also increasingly of technically demanding areas such as the electronics industry and semiconductors Research and Development (R & D). Science and Technology Outsourcing Strategies reports are new and provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of contract research and manufacturing. Additionally it identifies strategies for manufacturing companies to optimize their relationships with contractors. Emerging trends are evaluated and business opportunities are analyzed in rapidly growing markets.
In this study, we chose semiconductor suppliers to measure both (emerging trends and business opportunities) because of their potential for concept-specific accuracy and because of the unavailability of other measures across an entire sample. We selected a sample of 250 companies and sent surveys. Of the 250 surveys sent 146 (58.4%) were returned. These were coded, and then reviewed using variance analysis, canonical correlation analysis, and regression analysis.
The results showed that companies that acquired greater technological knowledge through their key customer relationships produced a greater number of businesses and developed greater technological distinctiveness. The result sheds new light on these studies by identifying knowledge acquisition as a technology through which partnerships benefit new product development. In short, a high level of trust may allow a relationship to run smoothly and may reduce some of the transaction costs associated with managing the customer relationship also actually increase knowledge acquisition. The limitation of the study is possible survivor bias. Our sample includes only semiconductors material suppliers that have survived, and it may be that different relationships would emerge if we had included failed firms in our sample. Biases inherent in the perspectives of the technology-based firms may also affect results.

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