تجزیه و تحلیل به اشتراک گذاری ریسک در پروژه های تحقیق و توسعه استراتژیک و پروژه های جدید توسعه محصول  An analysis of risk sharing in strategic R&D and new product development projects

1. Introduction Greater than one-fifth of the world’s gross domestic product, over $12 trillion dollars, was planned to be spent on projects in 2014 (Project Management Institute (PMI), 2014). Yet, we do not fully understand how these temporary endeavors affect the organization’s permanent systems or its alliances with other organizations (Sydow et al., 2004; Windeler and Sydow, 2001). Research on strategic projects suggests that firms use contracts to scope out projects, manage joint ventures, encourage cooperation (Adler, 2007; Ring and Van de Ven, 1992; Zaheer et al., 2002), and, in general, implement firm strategy. As Triana notes (2014: 3): “Based on PMI’s research, the Board’s thinking and also by my own experience as a practitioner, project management is growing and becoming more strategic…we can see that more executives around the world are linking organizational business strategy and projects.” In this manuscript, we are interested in exploring strategic projects to determine whether risk management strategies embedded within the contract are related to key project outcomes. Specifically, we consider how the construction of a project contract provides evidence for managing the financial risk associated with unplanned changes to project deliverables. We partition this risk into three distinct contract risk-sharing profiles: risk born primarily by the seller of products and/or services, risk born primarily by the buyer of the products and/or services, and risk that is shared between the buyer and the seller. Furthermore, we are interested in exploring whether the contract risk profile is related to key contract outcomes such as cost and scheduling budget overruns, and engineering change proposals that occur during the life of the project contract. To test our hypotheses, we use a robust data set that includes 240 contracts from the Air Force Material Command (AFMC) located at Wright–Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.