Dynamic Evaluation of Project Governance in Collaborative Innovation Projects: A Case of Industry Technology Research Institute

Abstract

Collaborative innovation projects (CIPs) are a typical type of inter-organizational collaboration project to deliver innovative results, in which diverse and dynamic collaborative relationships exist among stakeholders. The project’s success depends on appropriate governance mechanisms to coordinate the relationship between stakeholders. Contractual governance and relational governance both play an important role in successful project delivery. Existing research on the static evaluation method of project governance has obvious contradictions with the dynamic characteristics of stakeholder collaboration relationships during the innovation process. In response, this study proposes a dynamic evaluation method of CIP governance that uses stakeholder networks as the evaluation object, thus filling in gaps in the literature on CIP governance and contributing to the development of governance theory. A project of the Industry Technology Research Institute (ITRI) was chosen as a case study to evaluate the effectiveness of the procedure. The results show that contractual governance and relational governance both have a strong impact on stakeholder collaboration in the whole stage of CIPs. The governance effect is determined by the changeable contractual and relational governance structure, not just the stakeholder’s power of the general understanding. The findings have implications for the governance of CIPs and mainstream project governance research.