R and D activities as a strategic competition tool and an applied research in Turkish civilian defense industry

Manpower and capital which are the strategic sources of firms leaved off theirimportance to knowledge, producing knowledge and transferring it to production processduring transition to information society. Producing knowledge and transferring it to theproduction process became the main axis of national and international competition.Firms have to develop various competition strategies to survive. In today?s world thatcould be characterized with speeding up globalization, growing communication opportunitiesand very fast and mass production of knowledge and technology, competition will be verytough. Firms that couldn?t adapt themselves to changes and progress will not survive.Producing knowledge and transforming it to new products that provide competitionsuperiority will be the main competition strategy.?Defense and security? is one of the essential requirements of a state?s life, maybe thefirst one. It?s very clear that having a supreme defense industry is the basis of a capabledefense structure. A supreme defense industry is characterized with the ability of producingknowledge and transferring it to production process. Only the firms which have this capabilitywill have the ability of survive in local and global market.The main purpose of our study is to define, analyze and explain the data on R&Dactivities of the defense industry firms used as a strategic competition instrument in nationaland international arena by collecting systematic, reliable, valid and useful data.In our study, the process of using R&D as a strategic competition mean is composedof two main chapters which are theoretical and applied. In the latter the results of aquestionnaire applied in defense firms are presented.