Like all aspects of modern business, product development has become more challenging due to increased globalization. To a greater extent than ever before, firms are seeing new product development as a global process in order to take advantage of worldwide opportunities and increase their efficiency and effectiveness of innovation. According to a 2007 study by consultants Booz & Company, the top global firms in terms of R&D spending deployed about 55 percent of their R&D spending in foreign countries. Among the 80 top U.S. R&D firms, $80.1 billion out of $146 billion was spent overseas, and similar percentages were found for top European and Japanese R&D firms. The Booz &Company study also showed that the firms with higher percentages of R&D spending deployed elsewhere did better then average on many important performance measures, such as return on investment and total shareholder return