earticle

영어

R&D becomes a critical success factor in the development of science and technology, as well as sustainable innovation in business and national economies. To dominate the fast-changing and increasingly competitive global market, firms should be able to accurately reflect customer’s demands and deliver suitable products as soon as possible. However, success of R&D is low-probability precess because of R&D’s own characteristics and numerous environmental factors. There have been many efforts to study R&D success rate in various aspects. One of them is an approach to R&D process management. The importance of the R&D process has been verified by major studies. Nevertheless, few efforts have been made to standardize and categorize R&D processes. This paper aims to define the standard R&D process and identify the effect of performance of R&D process on firm’s performance. For the purpose, first, we made seven hypothesis about the relationship between R&D process and firm’s performance. Second, we defined R&D activities are classified into four levels (organizational, project-support, product execution and technology execution) and consist of a total of 25 activities based on the Stage-gate model of Cooper (1986). Third, we carried out a survey on R&D process of IT firms and collected data about their status of R&D process performance. We asked the respondents three questions about the R&D process: the goal level for the R&D process (the expected level of process performance), the performance (the degree of actual performance for the process) and improvement efforts (The efforts made for the last three years for the process thought to be needed to improve). Then we analysed the data using a partial least squares model and tried to investigate the relationships between R&D process performance and their performance. Finally, we discussed findings and contributions of this paper. This study is very valuable in the point that it suggests more detailed R&D process comparing with existing R&D process researches and derives influence relationship between R&D process and its performance based on actual data obtained through questionnaires. In addition, the results of this study can be used as a basis for decision-making when firms and government set up R&D process strategy. From the perspective of the firm, the results of this study can be used as a suggestion for making a decision for ‘achieving something in a short period with limited resources.’ Firms will be able to concentrate their resources on the product development process and the organizational process based on the research result that shows the organizational process and product development process have a greater impact on R&D performance than the support process and technology development process. Also, from the viewpoint of the government, the results of this study can provide the most effective support direction to support the R&D process of companies. The R&D improvement effort has a great impact on R&D performance considering the R&D target level or performance. This means that the improvement efforts on R&D performance are an important factor in raising the success rate of R&D. Therefore, the government can have policies that can make people recognize the importance of R&D for companies, in addition to the support of funding and human resources.