Unlike many other crimes, Intellectual Property thefts are all premeditated, the perpetrators are usually well-educated and business savvy. Their goal is pure and simple: to make money fastest with minimal risks.
Since you are, too, well-educated and business savvy. How would you do it?
The best way is to do it legally. Identify a proven business model and copy that, not the technologies or implementations. Search, smart phone, internet auction, internet video, flat screen TVs, nuclear power plants, pharmaceutical, etc. Microsoft copied Lotus 123, Pepsi Coke. In fact, few businesses started without copying someone else.
Next attempt reverse engineering: get the product, take it apart, studied the hell out of it, and try to make one just like it. This defines the entire generic drug industry. It was pioneered by Americans and perfected by Japanese.
The last resort is to steal the IPs. Honestly, morality aside, stealing is simply less profitable. It is hard to make a billion dollars this way.
If someone holds you family hostage and forces you to steal IPs from a US company, how would you do it? If you want to steal a DVD, where would you get it? Of course you would just buy one from the any store in the US. What about the source code of some software? Think.
Go the target company’s R&D center, bribe an employee, done.
Would you wait for the company to set up a development center in the offshore country, work to become their head of operation, and disappearing over-night with all assets and employees. If you do that, you are too stupid to be a threat.
Managers who worry about IP theft from offshoring, get real. Those who wanted your source code have already got them, from your headquarters.