Program and Project Management of Publicly Funded Research and Development: A Structural Viewpoint

To accelerate innovation, forming consortia for collaborative research and development (R&D) is encouraged. Therefore, the government has funded some programs for large-scale R&D projects. The present study investigates the program and project structures to promote collaborative R&D across multiple disciplines and sectors. As a case for empirical study, the Funding Program for World-Leading Innovative R&D on Science and Technology (FIRST) in Japan was selected. A series of analyses at the program level (n=30 projects) show that factors that promote academic outcomes (e.g., scientific publications) and facilitate activities toward industrialization (e.g., creating intellectual property) are separated. Moreover, the results suggest that the number of researchers explains the number of publications, whereas the number of patent applications does not justify the number of registrations. An analysis at the project level (i.e., one of the projects subsidized by the FIRST Program) was performed as a case study. The results of the case study imply that a strong relationship between actors accelerates the R&D cycle by sharing common knowledge, while a weak relationship ensures trans-disciplinarity or sectoral diversity by transferring domain-specific knowledge. Further, these results indicate that different mechanisms could exist at the program and project levels.