Commercialization of Government Funded R&D : Follow-up Research Survey on NEDO Research Projects

Drawing on data obtained from the questionnaire survey for the 242 private R&D projects supported by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization), Japan’s public management organization promoting R&D, this paper explores how the private R&D projects’ dependence on public supports affects their R&D processes and, in turn, projects’ performance and the commercialization of developed technologies. Our analyses show that dependence on government resources gives rise to some ―isolation. of the projects from the other parts of companies that they belong to. Such isolation, mainly derived from projects’ unique positions in ―double dependence. structures, negatively affects R&D performance especially related to commercialization. First, high dependence on public resources prevents project members from interacting with people outside the projects within the company. This precludes the projects to effectively leverage internal resources in overcoming technological problems. Secondly, high dependence weakens governance or control on project’s activities by internal management. This deters development of commercialization technologies and makes it difficult for the projects to acquire legitimacy for further investment towards commercialization. Our findings suggest that both companies and public funding agencies should promote projects to keep intimate relationships with the other parts of their organization for successful R&D leading to commercialization.

Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University

2011-02

English(eng)

technical report

VoR

32

IIR Working Paper

https://hdl.handle.net/10086/18926