تاثیر غیرخطی بر عملکرد پروژه "تحقیق و توسعه"

This study applies artificial neural network (ANN) to explore the relationships between the performance of R&D projects and its determinants. The results indicate that the quality of project environment has an inverse U-shaped effect on the performance of R&D projects, and both project managers' skills and the effectiveness of teamwork have monotonic positive influences on it. Besides, this study utilizes self-organizing map (SOM) to classify the Taiwanese information and electronics companies into three groups and further provides some suggestions. In addition, this paper uses an in-depth interview of qualitative research to explore why the quality of project environment has an inverse U-shaped effect on the R&D project performance, and finds out the main reason. There are two managerial implications in this study. First, the relationships between the performance of R&D projects and its determinants are not always linear in the complex and uncertain environment nowadays. Second, companies must care about the inverse U-shaped effect of the quality of project environment on the performance of R&D projects, although they can enhance the extent of project managers' skills and the effectiveness of their teamwork as much as possible.

Prior literature argues that firms implement strategies through projects, and thus project management contributes much to the field of management [1]. Because project management is important for the performance of organizations, exploring the topic of project performance is necessary [2]. Projects have predetermined objectives and often face a lot of complexity and uncertainty, because they have finite timelines [3], [4] and [5]. Besides, projects have finite resources and limited timeframes, so firms have to clearly communicate the objectives of projects to project members [4]. There are four purposes in this study: first, this study verifies whether the antecedents – the quality of project environment, project managers' skills, and the effectiveness of teamwork – influence the performance of R&D projects; second, this study explores whether the relationships between the performance of R&D projects and its antecedents have interesting nonlinear patterns, such as inverse U-shaped relationships; third, this study focuses on the R&D application and applies artificial neural network (ANN) and self-organizing map (SOM) in the area of project management; and fourth, this paper applies an in-depth interview of qualitative research to explore why the inverse U-shaped influence on the R&D project performance happens and to find out the main reason.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the nonlinear relationships between the performance of R&D projects and its antecedents – the quality of the project environment, project managers' skills, and the effectiveness of teamwork – by means of ANN. The results of ANN show that the quality of project environment has an inverse U-shaped effect on the performance of R&D projects, while project managers' skills and the effectiveness of teamwork have monotonic positive influences on it. Therefore, the results of this study support Hypothesis 1 (H1), Hypothesis 2 (H2) and Hypothesis 3 (H3). Hence, it means that there is an optimal value for the quality of project environment, though information and electronics companies can increase the extent of project managers' skills and the effectiveness of their teamwork as much as possible.