Performance Measurement of Collaborative Research and Development: An Exploratory Analysis

Collaborative research and development (RD) requires specific management approaches in several aspects including the measurement of RD performance. This paper aims to contribute to the debate on how performance of different types of collaborative RD activities should be measured. To this end, we conduct an exploratory research based on case studies, involving four cases of multinational companies in different fields. We show that firms use performance measurement systems for collaborative RD which are different compared to the ones used for non-collaborative RD. Furthermore, such performance measurement systems differ depending on the type of collaborative RD projects that companies are involved in.