Performance Measurement of Collaborative Research and Development: An Exploratory Analysis

Collaborative research and development (R&D) requires specific management approaches in several aspects including the measurement of R&D performance. This paper aims to contribute to the debate on how performance of different types of collaborative R&D 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 R&D which are different compared to the ones used for non-collaborative R&D. Furthermore, such performance measurement systems differ depending on the type of collaborative R&D projects that companies are involved in.