6. Conclusion
The challenges addressed in this paper are especially crucial for governments, which must allocate their limited national resources carefully to enhance their R&D efficiency, emphasizing implementation efficiency over technological novelty. Some predictors of the R&D project performance have been developed on the project structure and the communication mechanism (Hung and Chou, 2013; Hung et al., 2013; Hung and Shiu, 2014; Katz and Allen, 1985; Jiménez-Sáez et al., 2011). However, this study focused on the informal R&D team’s relational structure and investigated from the perspective of social networks, associated technological ties, and gatekeeper functionality, thereby verifying the predictability of each factor on R&D performance. Consequently, the empirical test from the Taiwan NTP data shows that a dense social network and the well-performed gatekeeper functionality of an R&D team enhance performance, even though dense technology ties are unable to support high R&D performance. The research results yield implications for project managers as well as the governmental policy of research sponsorship and strategic R&D partnership at the project level.
