What is Critical Success Factors for the Winning at New Products? : A Role-Play Card Game Simulation for R&D Projects

Companies have been increasingly opting to utilize project teams to contend with highly turbulent and dynamic conditions while under current uncertainty markets, stakeholders have tremendous influences on the performance of R&D projects. For example, as a key internal stakeholder, the top manager’s decisions including budget, personnel et al. could be vital for a R&D project team. The different interests among different internal and external stakeholders’ make the problem more complex. In this paper, we utilize the neural network algorithm to simulate the decisions from the top manager. With the data from non-industrial robotic R&D project teams in Japan, a neural network model of the top manager is constructed. Afterwards we design role-play card games to reconstruct the R&D processes of project teams. Two types of card, stakeholder card and technology card, are randomly allocated to the participants. Participants then decide their R&D strategies and the strategies are evaluated by the neural network model. From the role-play card game simulation, we find that there are some factors which are critical for the success of the R&D project team.