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Conditionally-mediated effects of scale in collaborative R&D

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Abstract

This paper reports the results of an empirical investigation into the role of project scale, as reflected in consortium size, on the impacts obtained by partners participating in publicly-funded collaborative R&D projects. I argue in this study that scale may affect performance indirectly rather than directly. Specifically, I model the influence of scale as being mediated by a set of intervening variables that may be said to “transmit” both positive and negative effects through (i) complementarity of resources, (ii) learning, and (iii) transaction costs in project implementation. Moreover, I hypothesize that these indirect effects are conditional on certain moderators that include resources committed, project management mechanisms, and project uncertainty and scope. The results offered in this study largely confirm the proposition of conditionally-mediated effects of scale on performance. They indicate that a number of conditional indirect effects are indeed significant, and surprisingly, that these effects are mostly negative.

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Notes

  1. CFA results are available from the author upon request.

  2. Efforts to complement these variables with “objective” indicators of outputs at the project level of analysis proved elusive. One such indicator could be the number of scientific publications resulting from the project. An attempt was made to derive relevant information from the ISI-Web of Science, but it proved extremely difficult to identify publications where (a) the author(s) came from one or more of the participating organizations and (b) could be attributed to the specific project. We encountered similar difficulties in extracting information from the PatStat database about the number of patents that may be attributed to each of the projects in the sample.

  3. I originally intended to use transaction costs as a single construct. However, CFA showed that unclear objectives and difficulties in coordination should best be operationalized as two separate constructs.

  4. In the analyses, I used each of these measures as a separate variable because CFA showed clearly that they do not constitute a single scale.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is based on research work carried out in the context of the Seventh Framework Programme for RTD (FP7), under the topic of “Scale and Scope as Drivers of the European Research Area”. I would like to thank Nick Vonortas, Henri Delange, Robbert Fisher, Wolfgang Polt and Babis Ipektsidis for their contribution in early stages of this research. I also thank Yannis Caloghirou, Charles Edquist and Georg Licht for their comments. Finally, I am grateful to the editor, Professor A. Link and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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  1. Department of Management Science and Technology, Athens University of Economics and Business, 47A Evelpidon & Lefkados 33, 113 62, Athens, Greece

    Yiannis E. Spanos

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Spanos, Y.E. Conditionally-mediated effects of scale in collaborative R&D. J Technol Transf 37, 696–714 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-011-9218-7

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