The interplay between the contextual conditions and the advancement of the technological maturity in inter‐organisational collaborative R&D projects: a qualitative study

Abstract

This paper analyses the evolution of the contextual conditions during the advancement of the degree of technological maturity of innovative technical solutions and their interplay with the R&D processes in the setting of collaborative inter‐organisational publicly‐funded R&D projects. Extant literature investigated the role of contextual conditions for the development process of technologies across different settings, but the evolution of their role has not yet been analysed in detail during the same development process over different levels of maturity. It has also not been investigated how the inter‐organisational collaboration is affected by this interplay. To address this gap, we put in place exploratory qualitative research in the empirical setting of collaborative inter‐organisational R&D projects that were funded by the EU's Research and Innovation Framework Programmes. Such projects often advance the maturity of several new technical solutions in different constellations of partners within the same project and therefore provide rich data for our analysis. The research design is a comparative multiple case study. We studied 5 projects that developed 49 innovative technical solutions, adopting a grounded theory approach, through the analysis of the project documentation and semi‐structured interviews. The evolution of the non‐technical contextual conditions and their interplay with the R&D processes and the inter‐organisational collaboration were found to be similar across different technologies, but their role was significantly different at different stages of the advancement of maturity. Medium TRLs constituted a watershed for inter‐organisational cooperation, whereas when going to higher TRLs, the role of the intra‐organisational context became dominant. As a consequence, the changes of the contextual conditions should be anticipated by project planners and project managers to avoid that the R&D processes get stuck at medium technology readiness levels. We also discuss the implications for policy interventions when reaching higher TRLs is intended.