Emergency of wicked problem: R&D policy impact on long term cooperation within project teams

R&D policy and operational rules with harmonised restriction within schemes of financial resource distribution shapes the strategic adaptation of behaviour of R&D implementers. High excellence and high R&D team performance is... [ view full abstract ]

R&D policy and operational rules with harmonised restriction within schemes of financial resource distribution shapes the strategic adaptation of behaviour of R&D implementers. High excellence and high R&D team performance is long term building process of cooperation within the team, who recognize each other as trustful and reliable partners during R&D project implementation. However new regulation and instantaneous restriction invoke unintentional strategic adaptation, what have not been foreseen before introduction of special restriction.
The goal of this paper is to deconstruct the emergency of wicked problem, occurred within R&D policy implementation. Biotechnology research group’s operated in Lithuania were selected for investigation. The empirical data were collected by the qualitative interview and social network analysis was carried out on quantitative data about projects’ teams. 5semi structural interviews were conducted during the period of August – September, 2015. For social network analysis, there were collected 121 projects, performed in the period of 2010-2015 and connected 146 with 534 ties.
The results demonstrate the intersection of pursued interests of researchers with R&D policy aspirations. Researchers have strong internal culture of doing research in cooperation within a team that cannot be affected immediately by the external forces in short one proposal application. Findings demonstrate that project teams mostly in all cases are very stable, with some exceptional rare cases when new members are invited. Those new members usually are students who are not bound by employment contracts. That can be an indication that selection of external members are restricted by organisational structure. Although research policy promotes communication and cooperation through mild recommendation to exchange of project teams and their members. Because the culture of trust building process is long term, the time-limited project affect unintentional short term adaptation.
In the conclusion needs to be underlined, that the culture of doing research in trustworthy long term project teams must be taken in to consideration as it works as standard of quality, so new policy elements needs to be introduces carefully avoiding unintentional wicked problems emergency.