International management of R&D: The Swedish Experience

This paper summarizes the results of in-depth case studies of international R&D management in four Swedish multinational corporations. The results suggest that foreign volumes and shares of R&D expenditures are rapidly increasing. Through a rapidly increasing number of foreign acquisitions, foreign R&D laboratories have been added. As part of international rationalization of production, foreign units have been given global product mandates with responsibility both for manufacturing and R&D. In maturing foreign subsidiaries, routine technical activities have often evolved into proper R&D. Tight labour market conditions for engineers in Sweden have made it increasingly necessary to exploit existing technical capacity, regardless of location.
Concurrently, companies face new pressures for international coordination and control of R&D. Coordination is required to reduce product differentiation, to facilitate technology transfer and to ensure the technical and market compatibility of products and components developed at different locations but sold as part of total systems. Drawing on the experience in the four investigated companies, the paper discusses how systems and procedures can be developed to meet the need for coordinated international R&D management.     

Flexibility planning for managing R&D projects under risk

Incorporating managerial flexibility in an innovative R&D project is important, because managers face greater uncertainty in today's competitive and dynamic changing environment. It is essential to bring managerial flexibility into R&D project planning to decrease technical and market risks, while increasing potential market value. The objective of this paper is to develop a flexibility planning methodology based on real option analysis to improve managerial flexibility for R&D projects. The proposed methodology identifies potential risks that may occur during every R&D stage. It also recognizes a cascading option structure to resolve the identified risks, and evaluates and selects adequate options that maximize the potential value of the project. Instead of using a traditional option pricing method, a dynamic programming model that considers multidimensional product performance and market payoff is used to evaluate the R&D project value. Using the proposed methodology, managers can identify future scenarios as a function of their management actions. The proposed flexibility planning methodology can help managers improve managerial flexibility of R&D project and increase the success rate of product launch. A drug development project is used to illustrate the proposed methodology.     

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.     

Business R&;D and the Interplay of R&;D Subsidies and Product Market Uncertainty

This paper examines the effect of product market uncertainty and government research and development (R&D) subsidies on firm-level R&D investment. Using a sample of German manufacturing firms, we find that product market uncertainty reduces R&D investment and government R&D subsidies increase R&D investment. Moreover, our results indicate that R&D subsidies mitigate the effect of product market uncertainty on R&D investment. These findings suggest that public policies aimed at increasing business R&D investment can achieve this objective by reducing the degree of uncertainty in the product market.      

A Further Note on Endogenous Spillovers in a Non-tournament R&;D Duopoly

This note considers the paper of Poyago-Theotoky (1999) on strategic R&D with endogenous spillovers. It proves through an example that, under R&D collusion, optimality sometimes requires either minimal or asymmetric spillovers. It also provides a simple sufficient condition for optimal spillovers between colluding firms to involve maximal spillovers (i.e., complete sharing of information).      

The R&D and marketing cooperation across new product development stages: An empirical study of Taiwan's IT industry

This study extends the new product development (NPD) process research to a new environmental context (Taiwan's IT industry) and a new business type (original design manufacturing, ODM). Taiwan's IT industry has achieved a very outstanding performance during the last two decades. The island's experience is quite valuable for those emerging countries that are struggling to transform themselves from producing low-value goods to making high-technology products. After analyzing the data collected from 153 research and development (R&D) and marketing managers in Taiwanese IT firms, this study finds that the higher the perceived importance of R&D-marketing cooperation is, the higher the attained level of R&D-marketing cooperation will be. Consequently, a better NPD performance can be achieved. This study additionally reports that a firm that has adopted a Defender innovation strategy attains a lower level of R&D-marketing cooperation, and has a poorer NPD performance than those firms that adopted either Prospector or Analyzer innovation strategies. Finally, environmental uncertainty has no significant impacts on the perceived importance and the attained level of R&D-marketing cooperation.     

A basic model for evaluating R&D performance: theory and application in Italy

Nowadays the public R&D laboratories have a fundamental role in countries' development, supporting businesses as they face the technological challenges in the turbulent world scenarios. Measuring the performance of R&D organisations is crucially important to decisions about the level and direction of public funding for research and development. This research considers the public laboratories like systems and develops a mathematical model based on the measurement of R&D activities with k‐indices. The score obtained from the research laboratories evaluation (relev) methodology synthesises in single value financial, scientific and technological aspects. It is an indicator, for R&D manager and policy maker, of performance in relation to other research organisations or in a time series. The method is an instrument of strategic planning and can be used for the improvement of individual activities and the overall performance of public R&D bodies.     

A CRM performance measurement framework: Its development process and application

We suggest a performance measurement framework called a customer relationship management (CRM) scorecard to diagnose and assess a firm's CRM practice. The CRM scorecard was developed through a rigorous and stepwise development process collaborated with a number of firms in a variety of industries. During the development process, we conducted an extensive literature review to build a theoretical causal map, in-depth interviews with practitioners to extract a hierarchical map from industrial perspectives, feasibility tests to check whether or not Key Performance Indicators (KPI) could be measured, and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) analysis to prioritize the evaluation factors on the CRM scorecard. The CRM scorecard contains antecedent/subsequent and objective/perceptual evaluation factors in four different perspectives to comprehensively measure corporate CRM capability and readiness. To illustrate the applicability of the proposed CRM scorecard, we apply the framework to a retail bank in Korea well-known for its exemplary CRM strategy.     

Business partnering—a driving force for innovation

Win-Win situations are used and also created by companies which cooperate with each other, complement each other on a synergy basis and work together fairly and competently. Today, business partnering has therefore become a key qualification for companies. This should not depend alone on the commitment of individual persons.This article describes how Siemens has organized its company, services and products using partnering solutions and how it has installed this concept as an intrinsically dynamic process. Thanks to institutionalized partnering, B2B interfaces have been established to form a rational alliance, offering benefits to all involved, and can be used regardless of the size of the company. These offerings generate Win-Win situations themselves—and provide individual employees in large companies with a structural framework for a personal partnering initiative.     

Internationalization of R&;D in China and India: Conventional wisdom versus reality

In spite of a growing trend of foreign research and development (R&;D) investment in China and India, academic research in this field has not kept pace. To what extent are opportunities and challenges of managing R&;D different in these countries from those in the West? By drawing on academic literature as well as press articles on this topic, we compare and contrast what the conventional wisdom suggests and what the realities are in China and India. We suggest that multinational corporations (MNCs) should not forget the conventional wisdom of managing their innovative R&;D policies but should also learn from the unique challenges and capabilities in China and India.     

A model of R&D leadership and team communication: the relationship with project performance

Industrial research and development (R&D) involves the processing and transformation of new knowledge into a commercially valuable outcome. Communication is an effective mechanism to translate, share and integrate new information into commercial products or processes. We developed a five-factor model of team communication comprising: leadership role performance, team boundary spanning, communication safety, team reflexivity and task communication and tested the model using a one-year longitudinal study. Analyses were conducted on team level data from 56 teams, comprising 350 employees. Independent measures of project performance were obtained from surveys of research managers as well as project customers. Three findings emerged. Different factors predicted different stakeholders' ratings of project performance. Communication safety was the strongest predictor of customer ratings of performance. Boundary spanning is most effective when performed by the project leader not the team.     

A model of value assessment in collaborative R&D programs

This study examines the tasks, processes, and frameworks central to performance assessment in collaborative research organizations. The domain of the study is the partnered learning approach to research and development (R&D) management. The empirical results highlight relationships between context (center scale) and performance (value perceived by industry sponsors) in such R&D collaborations. Insights from this research are broadly applicable to the maintenance of alliances among firms involved in collaborative R&D and are generalizable to that context. Data gathered from a national population of 58 National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored centers over a 3-year period reveal significant evolutionary patterns in the development of collaborative relationships. Successful industry university consortia leverage four core process relationships: (1) the creation of research capacity yielding advances in process and product knowledge; (2) technology transfer behaviors within the participants' organizations; (3) participant satisfaction with the outcomes; and (4) the continuity of industry sponsor support, i.e., commitment to the collaboration.     

CEO权力、融资约束与研发投资--基于我国上市公司的经验证据

国家对创新的大力支持以及管理者对创新的重视使得创新一直以来都是实践界和学术界的研究热点,研发投资在一定程度上代表了企业的创新投资。本文从融资约束的视角出发,采用实证研究方法,以2008~2018年我国A股上市公司为样本,系统地剖析了CEO权力、融资约束对研发投资的影响,研究发现权力越大的CEO越倾向于增加企业的研发投资;融资约束会抑制企业的研发投资;融资约束会抑制CEO权力对企业研发投资的提升作用;相较于国有企业,非国有企业的融资约束对企业研发投资的抑制作用更显著,且融资约束对CEO权力与研发投资关系的抑制作用也更显著。研究结论对于提高企业研发投资水平、提升企业创新成果转化效率进而提升企业核心竞争力与价值具有重要意义。     

Competition in Research and Development: A Theory for Contradictory Predictions

This paper develops reasons for the many seemingly contradictory findings in the literature about competition and research and development (R&D) investment. The theory of R&D competition implies that increases in competitive pressure may increase R&D investment, decrease it, increase it initially but decrease it over greater levels of competitive pressure (an inverted-U relation), decrease it initially but increase it over greater levels (a U relation), or have no effect at all.      

A framework for measuring logistics performance in the wine industry

Nowadays, in order for wine companies to reach a world-class standard, it is necessary to implement the industry best practices and continuously adapt their logistics processes. Through benchmarking, these enterprises can find opportunities for improvement. So far, little research in benchmarking and performance measurement has been developed for the wine industry. In this paper a logistics benchmarking framework for the wine industry is proposed. A benchmarking study considering several wineries from Mendoza (Argentina) is presented as a case study, in order to demonstrate the validity of the developed framework.     

Industrial brand value and relationship performance in business markets — A general structural equation model

This paper develops a general model of industrial brand value and relationship performance in business-to-business markets from the perspectives of consumer and industrial marketing literature. The structural equation model integrates the analysis of industrial brand value and relationship performance. The model describes the extent to which supplier-buyer transaction performance is influenced by the eight important factors: supplier competence, purchasing value, customer satisfaction, switching cost, brand trust and loyalty, relationship quality, commitment, and transactional performance.The general model is applied to organizational buyer groups of comprehensive industrial markets (Electronics, Chemicals, Equipment, etc). The analysis finds that supplier competence directly affects purchasing value and customer satisfaction, and via purchasing value and customer satisfaction, it indirectly affects commitment, switching cost, brand trust and loyalty. The managerial implications of the study results are also discussed.