How should we measure collaborative research and development performance?

Abstract

With the rapid growth of information technologies, collaborative R&D has become an important issue. Previous research indicates that R&D collaboration is a means to accelerate the commercialisation of new technologies, create new business, and reduce risk. Numerous studies focus on the benefits, importance, risks and disadvantages of R&D cooperation. Yet, performance measurements of R&D collaboration have received only scarce attention. While implementing R&D collaboration, it is believed that managers will not be able to efficiently manage new product development without clear performance measurements. This study investigates the measurement of R&D collaboration performance. The performance measurement of collaborative R&D can be divided into five categories: knowledge, efficiency, resources, markets, and relationships. This study highlights the importance of the measurements of R&D collaboration, including measurements of input, process, output, and outcome. These findings lead to important implications for R&D collaboration in pursuit of accelerated innovation.