Challenges in Managing Large-Scale Collaborative R&D Projects

Abstract

Project management is a critical success factor for any kind of project. When projects involve complex multi-organisational structures, requiring demanding collaborative processes, project management is a complex system in itself. Although this topic has been studied for decades, the ever-changing morphology of projects induced by the increasingly intricate financing schemes, call for a frequent and updated understanding of how the projects initiate, run, and close. Large-scale integrated collaborative projects are a recent example of complex collaborative projects that were not studied yet but can provide important insights for the project and innovation management fields. These projects are carried out typically by a large consortium including research organisations, sectorial technological centres, technology providers and end-user companies, having a significant impact on the technological innovation produced for a specific sector. This chapter reports a multiple case study of four large-scale integrated projects, in Portugal, following an inductive research design. The results showed that collaboration creation and collaboration management are crucial processes for such projects, with challenges intensified by the differences in goals and expectations of researchers and practitioners. The chapter will hopefully contribute to the future development of new models, tools and techniques that will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of this type of projects, by providing a systematisation of the challenges faced and how they were overcome during the cases analysed.