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The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into the contingent use of rational, intuitive and political decision-making in R&D.

This research is based on a study in an R&D department of a multinational high-tech firm in the Netherlands. The study consists of a case study design, focusing on four embedded cases, longitudinally studying each case.

The literature distinguishes three dimensions of innovation decision-making processes: rational, intuitive and political. By studying these interwoven dimensions over time, this study finds that the dominant use of each of these dimensions differs across the innovation process. There is an emphasis on intuitive decision-making in an early phase, followed by more emphasis on political decision-making, and moving to more emphasis on rational decision-making in a later phase of the R&D process. Furthermore, the predominant choice in a specific innovation phase for one of the three decision-making dimensions is influenced by the decision-making dimension that is dominantly employed in the preceding phase.

This study contributes to the innovation decision-making literature by developing and applying a model that distinguishes rational, intuitive and political decision-making dimensions, the interactions among these dimensions in innovation decision-making in R&D, and the contingency of these dimensions upon the innovation phase. It calls for further research into the contingent nature of innovation decision-making processes.

For practitioners this study has two relevant insights. First it highlights the importance and usefulness of intuitive and political decision-making in addition to the prevailing emphasis on rational decision-making. Second, practitioners may be more alert to consciously changing their dominant decision-making approach across the phases of the innovation process. Third, companies may adjust their human resource policies to this study’s findings.

The literature on rational, intuitive and political decision-making is quite extensive. However, research has hardly studied how these decision-making dimensions develop in conjunction, and over time. This paper reports on a first study to do so and finds that the dominant use of these dimensions is contingent upon the phase of the R&D process and on the decision-making dimensions used in earlier phases. The study suggests that using a contingency approach can help to further integrate the debate in research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the use of big data through patentometric insights for R&D decision-making.

This study assesses the inventive activity through ‘big data’ patents, registered by inventors worldwide, using WIPO Patentscope database. The objective is to use the insights from patentometrics for R&D decision-making. The data from WIPO PatentScope (https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/search.jsf) was searched for current patent scenario in area of ‘big data’. The data was further organized and cleaned using the Google ‘OpenRefine’. Data was pre-processed to remove all null values. Cleaned data was analyzed using programming language ‘R’, MS Excel (charts and Pivot tables) and free data visualization tool called ‘Tableau Public’, to get insights for R&D decision-making.

The key insights included trends (patents with years of publication), top technologies trending the current space, top organizations leading in these technologies and the top inventors who are publishing patents in these technologies through leading organizations were drawn. Details in Section 5 in the paper.

Global patent data is multi-lingual and spreads across a set of multiple databases. Domain experts may be required to assess, identify and extract the relevant information for analysis and visualization of multi-lingual distributed data sets. Government organizations generally have multi-dimensional goals that may be more toward societal benefits. On the other hand, the commercial companies are more focused on profit. Therefore, the performance management process has to be really effective because it is critical for getting value in the government sector.

Insights from patent analytics serve as the important input to R&D managers as well as policymakers to assess the global needs to plan the national orientation according to the global market. This will help further for R&D projects prioritization, planning, budget allocations, human capital planning and other gamut of R&D management and decision-making.

Facilitation for R&D institutions (government as well as private) to formulate the research strategy for the domains or research areas to delve into. R&D decisions will be completely data-driven making them more accurate, reliable, valid and informed. These insights are very relevant for policymakers as well to facilitate the need assessment to determine the National priorities, make improvements in meeting societal country-level challenges during the resource allocation at top and subsequently at all other levels.

Data analytics of global patents in “big data” till 2019 to get insights to facilitate R&D decision-making.

Drawing on the related insights from the upper echelon perspective, modern cognitive theory and path dependence theory, this paper aims to first integrate top management teams (TMTs) overseas experiences, research and development (R&D) strategic decision-making and innovation performance into a uniform theoretical framework and try to understand TMTs’ overseas experiences accounting for both the direct and indirect mechanisms of the variables involved within the transition economy of China.

The paper adopts research sample from the listed companies on the Growth Enterprises Market Board (GEMB) of Shenzhen Stock Exchange of China due to their stronger innovation consciousness. The research data are mainly from the WIND database of China, as the data issued in this database must be checked and approved by China’s legal institutions including China Securities Regulatory Commission and its authorized agencies. The samples cover different types of ownership and the vast majority of industries of China, which makes the objects a wide range of coverage and representativeness. In addition, according to suggestions of Podsakoff et al. (2003), the authors design the controlling measures from two aspects of data collection and statistical analysis to reduce the homologous error as much as possible.

Empirical results show that innovation performance is positively affected by the centrality overseas functional experience and industrial experience but negatively affected by the heterogeneity of overseas functional experience of TMT. Meanwhile, R&D intensity and modes play partially mediating effect in the relationship between TMTs’ overseas functional experience centrality and industrial experience heterogeneity and innovation performance, but for the relationship between overseas functional experience heterogeneity and innovation performance, R&D intensity leads to fully mediating effect.

This study contributes toward filling the gaps by elucidating the effect of TMTs’ overseas experiences on the innovation performance, identifying the mediating role of R&D strategic decision-makings in this relationship and empirically examining the acting mechanisms and paths of the variables involved in the Chinese context. In addition, practitioners could use these findings to improve their selection and training processes regarding both the top management members and the designing of the R&D strategies.

Decision making for acceptance of an R&D project occurs under uncertainty and may involve predominantly quantitative analyses, such as net‐present value, predominantly intuitive analyses, such as real options logic, or some combination thereof. This paper attempts to bring together two concepts of decision theory, i.e. heuristics and framing, and real options logic into one integrated view relative to R&D project valuation. It is believed that the integration of theory helps explain expected and unexpected decisions resulting from the R&D project valuation process.

It is proposed here that, under a typical R&D project review, aspects of two theoretical concepts integrate to aid project valuation and decision making. The aim of this paper is to develop a research framework leading to advancement in the understanding of the relationship of heuristic principles from decision theory and the valuation methodology of real options logic. Findings – As a conceptual paper, propositions and a research model representing the conceptual framework are presented.

Stemming from the propositions and research model, it is believed that the degree of influence that heuristics potentially exhibit on real options logic can be successfully measured. Confirming the degree of influence is a matter for future empirical research.

The originality of this paper is to develop a research framework leading to advancement in the understanding of the relationship of heuristic principles from decision theory and the valuation methodology of real options logic. In this framework, heuristics has been positioned as a moderator affecting project valuation derived by real options logic.

The purpose of this article is to explore the ability of a novel psychological theory of how people make decisions, narrative‐based decision theory, to help explain people's decisions about whether to continue investment in a research and development (R&D) project (R&D progress decisions).

The paper applies the new theory to an empirical finding of existing research on R&D progress decisions; the finding that instruction in the sunk cost principle seems to mitigate the sunk cost effect in R&D progress decision‐making.

By interpreting the empirical finding in terms of narrative‐based decision theory, the paper is able to clarify and extend an earlier explanation for the empirical finding. More specifically, by drawing on narrative‐based decision theory the paper is able to provide a more detailed explanation of how the predictor variable (sunk cost) and the moderator variable (instruction in the sunk cost principle) may exert an influence.

Based on the result of the exploration, the authors call for further investigations into narrative‐based decision theory's value in explaining R&D progress decisions, and other management decisions.

Furthermore, the authors call for investigations into how narrative‐based decision theory may help decision‐makers in improving the quality of R&D progress decisions.

Narrative‐based decision theory is a recent theory from the field of naturalistic decision‐making. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first article that, by using an example, illustrates how the theory may help in explaining the findings of empirical research on management decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a structured Multi‐Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methodology to help organisations efficiently allocate limited resources (investments in this case) to different R&D projects within attainable project portfolio strategy packages and select the efficient portfolios that align R&D investments to the corporate long‐term objectives.

In this paper a case study is used to present a proposed multi‐criteria methodology approach for project resource allocation. The method provides the decision maker with an ability to easily assess the impact of trading off R&D project portfolios tangible benefits (short‐term profits) and intangible benefits (reliability and risk) against constrained budget resources (investment costs), without the requirement for sophisticated and time‐consuming mathematical formulations.

Superior findings are achieved when decisions are assisted by computer‐based MCDM methodology.

The paper shows that the concept embodied in this multi‐criteria approach is applied in a case study to identify and select the efficient R&D project portfolios of a multi‐national manufacturing company.

The novelty of this paper lies in applying a multi‐criteria methodology that offers an integrated framework that allows efficient modelling of resource allocation of project portfolios. The ultimate benefit of this work can be seen in its dual effect of specifying efficient R&D projects within different attainable portfolio packages and in defining appropriate R&D investment strategies based on trading off benefits against organisationally constrained budget resources.

The purpose of this research is to conceptualize, define and measure resource orchestration capabilities of R&D teams pursuing advanced scientific research and technological innovation at public-funded R&D organizations in India.

A series of five mutually exclusive studies were designed over two years to develop and validate the ROCI scale within public research and development (R&D) organizations pursuing advanced scientific research and technological development in India. The first three studies address the refinement, reduction and rationalization of items for measuring the ROCI construct. The next study explores the factor structure underlying the ROCI construct whereas the subsequent one confirms the three-factor structure within empirical settings.

The resource orchestration capability towards innovation (ROCI) construct reflected through three sub-dimensions namely – adaptive structuring capability (ASC), synergistic leveraging capability (SLC) and decentralized decision-making capability (DDC), each loaded with their respective items can be used for capability measurement in public-funded R&D organizations.

R&D managers can use this ROCI scale to measure, monitor and improve the innovation-oriented resource orchestration capabilities of their R&D teams and help them improve their innovation performance.

This research contributes to the extant literature on resource orchestration for innovation management in three unique and original ways – theoretically-grounded conceptualization, empirical measurement and rigorous validation through multiple studies conducted in public-funded R&D organizations in India.

The purpose of this study is to explore the competitive source of Chinese firms in an industrial sector of complex product systems. It helps to reveal the organizational innovation developed by Chinese firms in coping with international competition and technological challenges.

The study uses a qualitative method of research. The evidences are mainly collected through interviews, field observation and document analysis.

A pattern of engineer-centered organization is the source of competitiveness of Nanrui (NR) Electric (NREC) in this study. The firm equips its front project teams, and now its overseas branches with developmental human resources and authorizes them the power of decision-making to leverage R&D projects. It is an emerging challenge to the traditional multi-national companies (MNC) pattern, and enables the Chinese firms to build their capabilities on context-based knowledge.

As a single-case study paper, there are limitations about the external validity of its argument. Through the in-depth discussion of the NREC case, this paper aims to generate some clues for future study in the relevant academic community, which can be a useful step to formal theorizing and modeling. That is why the authors develop the paper on a single case. As future directions of research, comparative studies covering more cases not only within the power system control and protection industry but also among different complex technology products industrial sectors are really needed.

For innovative firms from developing countries like China, they need to develop institutional arrangements to incentivize engineers in the frontline, which may help them to build competence upon successful interaction with customers. During the era of globalization, such a pattern may generate special competitiveness over giant multi-nationals or global production networks (GPNs).

The research provides an instructive case on the Chinese rise in industrial sectors of complex product systems. Its findings can not only provide enlightenment for industrial catch-up in developing countries through organizational innovation but also help to initiate a reconsideration of the traditional theorizing of MNC and GPN.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how emergent changes are handled in research and development (R&D) projects. R&D projects’ business potential lies in their exploration of the unknown; conversely, this makes them uncertain endeavours, prone to emergent changes.

Uses a single-case-study design, based on a projects-as-practice perspective and a soft systems methodology (SSM) analysis, to map how ad hoc R&D teams handle emergent changes, specifically the solution identification and assessment phase and the implementation plan. An R&D project in the power industry, involving over 250 engineers, was analysed.

This paper shows how emergent changes are handled differently from initiated changes during the decision-making phase. The system analysis shows that the most critical factors for managing these changes are: collective reflection between project parties; and including experienced engineers in implementation-plan reviews.

The results are of relevance both to R&D managers aiming to improve team performance and to general project management. Informal notions of emergent changes can be formalised in the change request process. Weaknesses in the project team’s organisation are highlighted, and details of how of how to mitigate these are provided.

Combines engineering-design and project-management research on emergent changes, adding to the former regarding people–organisational and strategic issues. Furthers understanding of the projects-as-practice approach and emergent change (deviations) handling by ad hoc teams in a project environment. SSM has not previously been used to explore aspects of projects-as-practice, and this is a novel way of adding to the body of knowledge on project praxis and practise.

This study aims to examine whether the age and tenure of the chair of the board of directors are related to research and development (R&D) investment in China.

This study uses A-share manufacturing firms that traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchange between 2009 and 2018. This study uses OLS regressions, controls for self-selection bias, and uses an instrumental variable to alleviate the concern of endogeneity.

This study finds that chair tenure has a negative relationship with R&D investment. This study does not find a significant relationship between chair age and R&D investment.

This study contributes to corporate governance and strategic management literature by highlighting chair tenure as a new factor affecting R&D investments. It also adds a significant contribution to the limited literature on the chair’s role in strategic decisions. Moreover, companies that are eager to strengthen corporate governance and maintain sustained innovation may reconsider the chair tenure. Given that many proposals for board governance reform explicitly stress the importance of limiting board tenure, this study contributes to policymakers by providing evidence in support of these proposals.