Using strategic ambiguity as management practice in academic R&D: an ethnographic study of MIT SENSEable City Lab

This article explores the role of strategic ambiguity as a management practice, as used in SENSEable City Lab – a R&D-oriented lab located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. Although literature has already explored strategic ambiguity in various organizational settings, studies focusing on how academic institutions use strategic ambiguity in the context of R&D are quite sparse. The article aims at filling this gap by reporting on a study conducted by the author across 2011 and 2014 in a R&D-oriented academic lab and reflecting on the potential of strategic ambiguity as an effective dialogic strategy to appreciate differences among internal organization members and with external partners. The article also examines some shortcomings of strategic ambiguity, such as the level of anxiety reported by some members of the lab.     

R&D management responses to the environment: current theory and implications to practice and research

The environmental problems faced by society are often regarded as global in importance. The global imperatives linked to environmental concerns pose critical questions about the international management of R&D. This theme is developed in this paper which was initially written as the basis for a workshop on R&D management responses to the environmental challenge held as part of the 1992 Conference on Managing R&D Internationally at Manchester Business School.
The paper considers recent literature on R&D management responses to the environmental challenge drawn primarily from English language sources out extending beyond traditional R&D management literature. The intention was to identify current theories about R&D management and the general business context for R&D and to consider the implications of environmental concerns for R&D management practice.
The paper suggests that R&D management and the environment is still at a relatively early stage of development. Nevertheless, there is a demonstrable gap between the approaches to environmental problems adopted by R&D practitioners and those chosen by R&D theoreticians. This mirrors a more general gap between theory and practice seen in the basic R&D management literature.
In general, R&D management and the environment has been constructed in the literature as a set of tools and techniques, rather than a strategic management issue. However, there is a developing body of literature which links R&D management and environmental management in a more strategic way and focuses on the need to consider organizational as well as technological change.
The paper concludes that an important way forward for research in this area is to establish an R&D Management and Environment Focus Group to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to explore the application of environmental concepts to R&D management.     

The importance of internal and external R&D network linkages for R&D organisations: evidence from Singapore

This paper examines the importance of internal and external R&D networks for R&D organisations of multinational firms (MNCs) in Singapore and investigates corresponding R&D management requirements in this context, namely a late-industrialising country in Asia. A unique feature of Singapore is its ability to attract 'high quality' foreign direct investment, involving activities of higher value added and more complex technology without having developed full-fledged R&D activities among its business organisations, thus creating a challenging situation for subsidiary R&D managers, both in the internal R&D organisation as well as in the external research environment. This paper analyses these issues.
Based on in-depth interviews with 53 R&D subsidiaries of MNCs operating in Singapore, this paper identifies internal and external R&D management needs. Through our analysis of data gleaned from these interviews, we found that subsidiary R&D managers need to increase and/or maintain the strategic importance of their R&D site internally within their global corporate R&D organisation. This requires constant upgrading of the technological level at the R&D subsidiary and intense communication with headquarters as well as other R&D subsidiaries. Furthermore, our findings indicate that in the external research environment, subsidiary R&D managers need to create an efficient local network of external players. If these internal and external issues are properly addressed, the R&D subsidiary can effectively contribute to the corporate R&D organisation and be a critical partner in the local research network. Lessons learned from the Singapore experience include the need to develop sufficient local expertise as well as to change the mindset of managers to focus on creativity rather than precise execution.     

Achieving contextual ambidexterity in R&D organizations: a management control system approach

Research on how managers control R&D activities has tended to focus on the performance measurement systems used to exploit existing knowledge and capabilities. This focus has been at the expense of how broader forms of management control could be used to enable R&D contextual ambidexterity, the capacity to attain appropriate levels of exploitation and exploration behaviors in the same R&D organizational unit. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for understanding how different types of control system, guided by different R&D strategic goals, can be used to induce and balance both exploitation and exploration. We illustrate the elements of this framework and their relations using data from biotechnology firms, and then discuss how the framework provides a basis to empirically examine a number of important control relationships and phenomena.     

Managing academic R&D as a business at K.U. Leuven: context, structure and process

In this paper, we elaborate on how academic R&D can be managed as a business. Based on the case of K.U. Leuven Research and Development, it is shown how an academic institution can develop the context, structure and processes conducive to managing academic R&D as a business. It is argued that universities that intend to take advantage of the economic opportunities of their R&D programmes, should leverage their innovation potential through appropriate strategies, organizational structures and management processes that allow them to manage part of their R&D portfolio as a business without hampering though the fundamental academic values and activities of research and teaching. This balancing act has been the responsibility of K.U. Leuven Research and Development for the last 28 years. It is the subject of the case study reported in this paper.     

Formal versus informal knowledge networks in R&D: a case study using social network analysis

The existence of informal social networks within organizations has long been recognized as important and the unique working relationships among scientific and technical personnel have been well documented by both academics and practitioners. The growing interest in knowledge management practices has led to increased attention being paid to social network analysis as a tool for mapping the nature and membership of informal networks. However, despite the knowledge-intensive nature of research and development (R&D) activities, social network analyses of the R&D function remain relatively rare. This paper discusses the role of informal networks in the development, exchange and dissemination of knowledge within the R&D function. A case study using social network analysis is used to compare and contrast formal and informal knowledge networks within ICI. Marked differences between the informal organization and ICI's formal structures for knowledge exchange are revealed and a series of insights into the working habits of technical staff are presented. The implications for managers are clear: through a better understanding of the informal organization of R&D staff, they can more successfully capture and exploit new ideas; more efficiently disseminate information throughout the function; and more effectively understand the working habits and activities of employees.     

Business Strategy, R&D Management and Environmental Imperatives

Abstract
Environmental imperatives are seen by many business leaders to represent a major issue for the 1990's and beyond. The debate about the environmental sustainability of economic activity has important implications for the development of business and places considerable emphasis on the need for planned corporate change. The strategic significance of the environment is particularly critical to R&D as this is characterised by long planning horizons and provides the setting for the development of future products and processes.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the connections between environmental imperatives, strategic change and R&D management. To this end the paper reviews the strategic nature of environmental pressures on business. From this base, consideration is given to the responses required by business, in meeting these pressures. The paper concludes by suggesting that the application of management techniques in concert with organisational change is needed for R&D management to build environmental considerations effectively into innovation. These suggestions can be used to gauge how far individual businesses have developed the systems and structures to enable them to move towards sustainability. The implication of the paper is that R&D management will not only need to apply new management techniques but will have to play a leading role in innovative organisational structures in order to fulfil the full potential of environmentally sensitive products and processes.     

From R&D to strategic knowledge management: transitions and challenges for national laboratories

The past two decades have witnessed unprecedented changes to national laboratories as they have adjusted to globalized and technology based competition. These transitions are reviewed in the context of how Canada's National Research Council has progressed from an internally oriented R&D organization into a more externally focused innovation organization, now coping with the challenges of strategic knowledge management. The paper traces the steps and paradigms involved in this transition and offers some commentary on the extent of the corporate cultural learning that has been required to effect these changes.     

Networks and the Decision to Persist with Underperforming R&D Projects

Drawing on aspiration level theory and the networks literature, this paper develops a model toward decision makers' persistence with underperforming R&D projects based on the perceived properties of their personal network. The assumption is that positive feedback from network partners motivates persistence, and that this effect is multiplied when the decision makers' network is larger and denser, when network ties are predominantly strong, and when communication frequency within the network is high. The model is tested by a field experiment and conjoint methodology. Analysis of 1632 persistence decisions nested within 51 scientists responsible for R&D projects reveals that more positive feedback enhances persistence of underperforming R&D projects, and that this effect becomes stronger with increasing network size, network density, and communication frequency. These findings extend the project management literature by focusing on the social environment of the decision maker as one so far neglected factor in empirical studies on persistence decisions. Moreover, this study is among the first to investigate contingency relationships between feedback received from network partners and network structure. Finally, while most studies have emphasized that individuals and organizations can profit from their engagements in social networks, this paper suggests a potential dark side of networks by showing that networks can encourage decision makers to persist with their investment in an underperforming—and potentially failing—project. These results can help project managers involved in networking activities to better understand the effects of these activities on their decision policies, and thus draw better and more accurate decisions. Second, this study provides insights into how organizational strategy with respect to dissemination of R&D results and involvement of the organization's R&D managers in the scientific community influences the persistence of underperforming R&D projects, and thereby the organization's R&D expenditures. This can assist top managers to design financial controls and allocate financial resources to managers of underperforming R&D projects in line with the organization's networking strategy.     

Unveiling dimensions of organizational culture: an exploratory study in Malaysian R&D organizations

Previous literature indicated that research and development (R&D) activities are influenced, to a large extent, by the culture of the organization. While these studies have identified elements of culture that are conducive to R&D, identifying the existing dimensions of organizational culture in Malaysian R&D organizations has not been empirically explored. The measures for this study were originally developed for the sole purpose of capturing cultural aspects in R&D organizations in the Malaysian context. These measures were developed based on the relevant issues discovered from exploratory case studies and nine categories of cultural values identified from the literature. A sample of employees (n = 198) from 45 R&D organizations took part in this study. Factor analysis was adopted to uncover common underlying dimensions (factors) of the organizational culture construct. The findings suggest that the organizational culture construct in R&D organizations may best be represented through a structure of eight factors. The eight factors are teamwork and knowledge sharing, empowerment and recognition, conformity and impediments to R&D, risk‐taking, customer orientation, autonomy, social networking, and organizational design. Despite some methodological issues that arose from this study, this model has the potential to become a management instrument to measure the underlying culture in R&D organizations. R&D managers can deploy this model to establish the baseline level of research culture in their respective units and thus provide the foundation for management initiatives to drive R&D activities. This model can also be used as benchmarking parameters when an R&D organization intends to evaluate various aspects of their organizational culture in relation to others that are considered to be leaders in the industry.     

Social Capital as a Microlevel Origin of Organizational Capabilities

The microlevel concept of social capital has received significant attention in management and sociological research but has not yet been empirically associated with the development of organizational capabilities. The major purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship of social capital with marketing and research and development (R&D) capability and to explore how the environmental context moderates the social capital–organizational capability link. It is suggested that top management's social capital provides a firm with important information and control benefits that facilitate effective access to the knowledge and resources necessary for building superior organizational capabilities. In addition, we identify the role of two important environmental factors influencing the social capital–organizational capability link: technological turbulence and competitive intensity. The strength of the relationship between social capital and organizational capabilities is proposed to vary depending on the level of these two environmental characteristics. This study conceptualizes and operationalizes social capital as a multidimensional construct reflected by the structural dimension of tie strength, the relational dimension of trust, and the cognitive dimension of solidarity. Survey and archival data on 280 firms from various industries are analyzed using structural equation modeling. Empirical support for the proposed three‐dimensional structure of social capital is found. Results further indicate that social capital is a significant antecedent to both marketing and R&D capability, which in turn significantly affect firm performance. While a positive relationship between social capital and organizational capabilities is supported in general, the strength of this relationship depends on the environmental context the firm is embedded in. The positive effect of social capital on marketing capability increases in environments with high technological turbulence and competitive intensity; the opposite holds for R&D capability. This research contributes to the resource‐based view by introducing social capital as an important microlevel factor promoting the development of organizational capabilities. By identifying and evaluating two important environmental contingencies, our study also decreases some of the ambiguity surrounding the effectiveness of antecedents to organizational capabilities. The findings further help practitioners decide under what circumstances investing in top‐managers' social capital provides an effective means for achieving superior performance through enhanced organizational capabilities. This should have an important bearing on issues such as management training and incentives as well as on hiring policies.     

Open R&D and open innovation: exploring the phenomenon

There is currently a broad awareness of open innovation and its relevance to corporate R&D. The implications and trends that underpin open innovation are actively discussed in terms of strategic, organizational, behavioral, knowledge, legal and business perspectives, and its economic implications. This special issue aims to advance the R&D, innovation, and technology management perspective by building on past and present studies in the field and providing future directions. Recent research, including the papers in this special issue, demonstrates an increasing range of situations where the concept is regarded as applicable. Most research to date has followed the outside-in process of open innovation, while the inside-out process remains less explored. A third coupled process of open innovation is also attracting significant research attention. These different processes show why it is necessary to have a full understanding of how and where open innovation can add value in knowledge-intensive processes. There may be a need for a creative interpretation and adaptation of the value propositions, or business models, in each situation. In other words, there are important implications for new and emerging methods of R&D management.     

Utilizing the balanced scorecard for R&D performance measurement

R&D programs are critical for many firms to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. Yet, measuring R&D performance over time can be quite complex due to inherent uncertainty. The paper responds to calls in the R&D literature to explore integrated performance measurement systems that capture financial and nonfinancial performance. We integrate the Stage-Gate approach to R&D management with the Balanced Scorecard to present a framework to show how firms can link resource commitments to these activities and the firm's strategic objectives. In this paper, we provide specific examples of how firms can apply this integrated performance measurement system to the R&D function.     

Building an entrepreneurial knowledge culture in a national research laboratory

The paper examines some recent trends in the strategic evolution of the corporate performance and culture within the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), where a substantive shift in context and strategic management over the past decade has enabled the NRC to move from being a largely internally driven R&D culture toward a more entrepreneurial and externally guided knowledge management culture.     

Strategic management of intangible assets and value drivers in R&D organizations

This paper takes a resource-based view of the R&D process. Based on the literature, we forward a theory that allows us to predict the dynamic interaction and transformation of five key resources, namely human, relational, organizational, monetary, and physical. Utilizing visualization tools allows us to test this theory on various levels in order to draw insights from the data. The output of the analysis improves the strategic understanding of an organization. In particular, it improves the understanding of how intangible resources drive the value creation in an R&D organization. Further analysis of the data allows us to identify resources that are either under utilized or over utilized, which might indicate inefficiencies in the organizational performance.     

Endogenous Network Formation in Patent Contests And Its Role as A Barrier to Entry

In a setting of R&D competition, we study how collaboration affects strategic decisions during a patent contest, and how the latter influences the collaboration network structures the firms can form. We use an all pay auction approach to endogenize both network formation and R&D intensities, and to take heterogeneous and private valuations for patents into account. We find that the complete network is not always the only pairwise stable one. The other stable networks have the realistic property that some firms drop out of the contest. Thus, ‘weak’ cooperation can serve as a barrier to entry on the market for innovation.     

How entrepreneurial orientation can leverage innovation project portfolio management

Innovation project portfolio management (IPPM) is a key task in R&D management because this decision‐making process determines which R&D projects should be undertaken and how R&D resources are allocated. Previous research has developed a good understanding of the role of IPPM in R&D strategy implementation and of successful IPPM practices. But the fundamental orientations that drive the strategy formation and implementation process have never been investigated in the context of IPPM, and it is unclear whether successful practices are equally valid for different strategic orientations. This study, therefore, investigates the moderating impact of a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation on the relationship between strategic portfolio management practices and portfolio success. An empirical analysis of 257 firms shows that both innovativeness and risk taking as entrepreneurial orientation’s dimensions positively moderate the relationship between managerial practices and performance. Specifically, we find that firms high in innovativeness profit more from stakeholder engagement compared to firms low in innovativeness. Firms high in risk‐taking profit more from a clearly formulated strategy. With increasing innovativeness and risk‐taking propensity, firms also profit more from business case monitoring and agility in portfolio steering. The results suggest that a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation can leverage the effect of IPPM practices. Vice versa, a lacking entrepreneurial orientation can render these practices ineffective. Strategic orientation and IPPM practices should, therefore, be aligned with each other to enable firms to better implement their strategy and generate competitive advantage.     

The integrative domain of foresight and competitive intelligence and its impact on R&D management

R&D takes years to come to fruition, thus choosing R&D programs should be set in the context of the environment that will exist at the time that research is completed. Foresight and competitive intelligence are two fields that seek to address future oriented environmental scanning. The paper looks at what the domains of foresight and competitive intelligence entail and in particular how competitive technical intelligence can work to integrate and enable competitive agility in foresight positioning. Focus is put on reviewing literature that addresses how foresight impacts R&D project selection. A review is made on foresight programs from around the world based on a recently completed study on Canada's foresight capacity. The authors conclude that agile organizations need to be adaptive and well prepared for tomorrow's challenges and so by integrating competitive technical intelligence, (typically oriented to business needs) with strategic technology foresight, (typically designed to address government priorities for technology investments and innovation policy issues), enterprises will be best positioned to address uncertainties in the technology cycle.     

A contemporary justice perspective on dual ladders for R&D professionals

Research and development (R&D) professionals play a key role in companies' innovation performance. Whereas prior research has indicated the potential benefits of dual ladder career systems to retain and motivate R&D professionals, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the design properties of dual ladders that facilitate such positive effects. The purpose of this study is to address this research gap by exploring how organizations can design dual ladders to enhance R&D professionals' organizational commitment and career satisfaction. Drawing on contemporary justice theory, we point to two factors integral for the successful application of dual ladders: the perceived equality of the technical ladder and the transparency of the dual ladder. These factors are related to R&D professionals' organizational commitment and career satisfaction. Furthermore, this study investigates whether these relationships are moderated by R&D professionals' age and self‐directedness in career management as well as firm size. The hypotheses are tested in a cross‐level study with 9 heads of R&D departments, 32 human resource managers, and 382 R&D professionals from 32 organizations. Based on the analyses, this study finds positive relationships between the perceived equality and the transparency of the dual ladder with R&D professionals' organizational commitment and career satisfaction. In addition, the findings show that the effects of the perceived equality of the technical ladder on R&D professionals' career satisfaction are weaker at high levels of self‐directed career management. The study contributes by developing theory on the consequences of dual ladders' design properties and moderating influences thereon. Thus, this research has implications for the literature on innovation management by expanding the knowledge on the interplay between career management and the human side of innovation.