The motivations for R&D collaboration fall into a number themes including: securing strategic resources; gaining best value with limited resources; cost minimisation and policy decisions. Kyung Ju Han of the University of Sussex has been studying these motivations and was grateful for the generous funding provided by RADMA in 2017 which supported his Postgraduate Student fieldwork research in South Korea.

He explains that his research aims to understand the underlying mechanisms of inter-organisational R&D collaboration across main actors in the innovation system such as firms, hospitals, public research institutes (PRIs), and universities in the digital healthcare sector.

Particularly, I pay attention to the strategic motives of focal organisations in the establishment of the collaboration as well as to understanding how different inter-organisational collaborative structures depending on the strategic motives have an impact on R&D performance such as SCI papers, patenting, and commercialisation activities.

Moreover, I deal with the strategic motives in establishing collaboration with three different theoretical perspectives. They include intrinsic properties of individual organisations such as cost minimisation and securing strategic resources for value maximisation perspectives, and institutional properties of the innovation system like R&D policy.

I am doing a monograph for my thesis and any other outputs were not yet produced.

What was the most interesting thing that you learnt while working in research?

My survey revealed that for the focal organisations I was studying, the most influential motivation in the establishment of R&D is the resource-based view (i.e. securing strategic resources for value maximisation).

This finding is cross-validated with interview data. Furthermore, for-profit organisations, firms, are significantly more affected by the strategic motives to minimise research and administrative costs and to have priority over IPRs in establishing R&D collaboration than universities and PRIs.

Interestingly, I found institutional properties of the innovation system significantly more influential for small-sized firms in developing R&D collaboration than medium-sized firms. Moreover, I also found that hospitals seek to  collaborate with firms to shorten lead time for the realisation of their ideas from a clinical site, while they collaborated with universities to gain benefits from access to grants.

If someone wanted to learn more about this subject what would you recommend they read?

• Lee, and Bozeman. (2005). The impact of research collaboration on scientific productivity. Social studies of science, 35(5), 673-702.
• Golichenko. (2016). The National Innovation System: From Concept to Research Methodology. Problems of Economic Transition, 58(5), 463-481.
• Barney. (1991). Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of Management, 17(1), 99-120.
• Williamson. (1985). The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: firms, markets, relational contracting. New York.
• Belderbos,Carree, and Lokshin. (2004b). Cooperative R&D and firm performance. Research policy, 33(10), 1477-1492.
• Hacklin, and Wallin. (2013). Convergence and interdisciplinarity in innovation management: a review, critique, and future directions. The Service Industries Journal, 33(7-8), 774-788.
• Yin. (1994). Case Study Research: Design and Methods (Vol. 5): SAGE Publications.
• Miller, and French. (2016). Organizing the entrepreneurial hospital: Hybridizing the logics of healthcare and innovation. Research policy, 45(8), 1534-1544.
• Thune, and Mina. (2016). Hospitals as innovators in the health-care system: A literature review and research agenda. Research policy, 45(8), 1545-1557.

What are you doing now and does this build on your knowledge of R&D Management?

I am now coping with empirical analysis based on the data collected from my fieldwork; my supervisors are Ben Martin and Puay Tang.

The purpose of the analysis is to arrive at a better understanding of underlying mechanisms in inter-organisational R&D collaboration such as how different collaborative structures contingent on strategic motives are developed, and how the collaborative structures affect R&D performance.

In this study, I focus, not only on the strategic motives based on institutional of the innovation system and intrinsic properties of individual organisations, but also on relationships between collaborative structures and their performance to arrive at a better understanding of underlying collaboration mechanisms.

Thus, I am expecting this research is able to contribute at least something both to my knowledge and to the R&D Management discipline.

What do you think RADMA offers the research community?

Even though I have known the RADMA only for around two years now,  RADMA plays a crucial role in knowledge production, sharing, and disseminations of R&D management through supporting funding for the early stage of researchers in this field, running the outstanding journal, and conferences. I really appreciate your efforts.