Human Resources in R&D

			Falling off the Ivory Tower in the Era of Open Innovation
			Towards a Better Understanding and Management of Human Resources in Industrial R&D
			Principal Investigators: Andrea Piccaluga Alberto Di Minin Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna

					To what extent does the Open Innovation (OI) paradigm require a change in the behavior of individual researchers and in the HR tools which are needed to manage these researchers?
			We have learnt that The R&D department is not located (anymore) in an Ivory Tower. Good ideas are to found (also) beyond corporate labs, and firms are mastering different modes of commercialization of their investment in innovation. This research evolves around a bottom-up architecture and looks at the individual industrial R&D practitioner to explore his/her changing role in the firm. To what incentives do Research and Development technicians respond? What organizational dynamics do they appreciate and how is it possible to develop make the most of their working activities? How do R&D practitioners respond to the challenges of Open Innovation and internationalization? In order to address these and other questions, Scuola Sant’Anna di Pisa is conducting an investigation aiming to describe and compare the role and perceptions of a particular category of firm employee, made up of scientists, researchers and developers.
			Theoretical Background The literature on the management of HR in R&D and the various solutions for the organization of R&D Labs which should offer answers to the aforementioned questions remains very scarce. Allen (1977) has analyzed and further investigated interactions among researchers as well as differences between more engineering-oriented and science-oriented knowledge workers. Sapienza (1995) has emphasized the difficulty of managing and coordinated professionals in R&D, and anecdotal evidence is available particularly open or more traditional research environments. Nonetheless, the work of scholars such as Roberts and Fusfeld (1981) has not been replicated in order to verify whether the apparently consolidated roles in R&D need some updating and revision. Only the importance of the dual career has really been object of continuous analysis (Roth 1982; Allen and Katz 1986; Kim and Cha 2000). Incentives for researchers have been studied by scholars such as Frost and Holzwarth (2002) and preferences for certain types of research by Kim and Oh (2002). More numerous the studies about R&D teams, such as Barczak and Wilemon (2003). On the whole, however, insufficient research has been done on the impact of the Open Innovation model on the behaviour of individual researchers. For more info on the theoretical background...
			Research Objectives The research project has two main objectives, one general and one more specific. The larger goal is to analyze, in depth, themes related to the organization of human resources in R&D activities, such as the types of work of R&D technicians, their system of rewards and incentives, etc. The more specific goal of this research is to determine to what extent the industrial technician’s profile is undergoing change. Indeed, it has been maintained that today, more than ever before, industrial researcher/developers are involved in “downstream” phases of R&D (application of results and their transfer), are more familiar with the strategies and economic financial institutions of their company, and work in more strikingly interdisciplinary teams, often playing multifunctional roles. This entails that the single technician is subject to different pressures and responsibilities and must respond to more diverse challenges than a traditional management of human resources could assure. This project aims to verify to what extent a new R&D technician role has emerged, in contrast to the traditional profile of the technician as strictly involved in R&D activities. Whether this evolution, beyond being real, is also desirable for the competitiveness of companies will also be discussed.
			Methods This project combines information regarding the structure of incentives and organization of R&D with impressions gathered from “the field” of who is in charge in the course of the various phases of R&D, who intuits and lives through such organizational choices. In order to explore the organizational dynamics of the work in R&D centers, this investigation centers around the single R&D technician asked to respond to a questionnaire about his or her daily activities. The questionnaire, designed and carried out by the Scuola Sant’Anna and to be completed online, is currently presented to Italian researchers and developers from a diverse array of companies. In addition, several interviews with human resource and R&D managers provides a clear picture of the internal structure of the firm. The objective of the questionnaire and supplemental interviews is to provide sufficient data in order to create a customized, diagnostic report of a single firm, while also permitting a comparison among several different industries.
			Feedbacks for Firms Firms participate in this research in order to understand in a finer and more innovative way the internal dynamics of their group of R&D, and to understand the organizational, structural system from ground level. A similar investigation has never been accomplished in Italy, and although the research will be conducted for primarily academic/scientific purposes, the firms which participate in the project can find its results useful for drawing interesting starting points for reflection. To truly understand how the organizational system itself is perceived by such a peculiar category of firm personnel, and to possibly identify points of strengths and weaknesses, constitutes in itself an important starting point for many strategic decisions. It may be particularly informative and useful in the case, as is suspected, that traditional roles within R&D are rapidly changing. A discussion of gathered results, with insight from the researchers of Scuola Sant’Anna, and a verification of positioning relative to other firms that make up part of the group of analysis should be viewed as a path toward possible improvements in one’s organizational system as well as an outlook on how it is perceived by R&D technicians. This research is thus not only valuable on statistical and informational grounds, but also for practical reasons, as it may lead to improved human resource management.
			Confidentiality The collected data are considered confidential and are treated as such. In the analysis and discussion, information which could be used to identify firms or individual participants are not used. Any firm can, however, agree with the others to share their own position, based on gathered results, which would allow customized benchmark analysis reports to be performed under the supervision of Sant’Anna researchers.