Influences by Involvement of Supported and Supporting Organizations on Publicly Supported Private-sector R&D Projects

Abstract

This paper explored the factors leading to the success of publicly-funded private R&D projects by analyzing survey data obtained from 506 projects supported by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization). We particularly examined how involvement of both the funded firm and the funding organization in the project affects the project's commercialization performance.

Our analyses showed that the project with higher strategic importance and stronger executive's involvement tended to be successful since it enabled the project to effectively leverage company's internal resources. On the other hand, funding organization's involvement had positive effects on performance only when the company showed low commitment to and weak involvement of the project; it had no or rather negative effect on performance with higher commitment and involvement in the company side.

Our findings suggest that the success or failure of the publicly-funded private R&D is greatly related to the strategic position of the project within the company. This implies that the assessing the company's in-house factors besides potentials of the technologies is important in selecting funding projects, and that the funding organization should find an appropriately way of managin g the project depending on project's strategic position.