The Research On R&D Control Modes Selection Of High-Tech Enterprises

With the ever-increasing fast speed of technology renovation, intensive market competition, individualized consumption tendency and greatly shortened product lifetime, High-Tech Enterprises (HTE) have to develop new products, improve product quality, and reduce the product cost and the time to come into the market continually in order to survive and develop. These all rely on the enterprises' research and development (R&D) ability. A successive, efficient and prompt R&D core competence has grown out to be the lifeline of a company. Consequently, R&D activities control renders to be the focus of corporation technology management. And then problems arise accordingly, that is: how many R&D control modes are there in High-Tech Enterprises? What are the differences among them? What is the best environment they fit to? Therefore how to select R&D control mode efficiently which is based on the characteristics of the enterprises and R&D activities has become the theoretical frontier and hot issue attracting international attention in this domain. This paper aims at analyzing and establishing R&D control mechanism in order to guarantee high efficient R&D performance in the long run. We firstly review the present research on R&D management. Then,based on agent theory, management control system theory, and flexible management theory, we analyze the differences between R&D activities control and other non-R&D activities control, discuss the theoretical root on flexible R&D control, and propose the frame of this research. Based on the relative management theories and literature review, and the research conclusion on the first stage of our team, this article first analyzes and compares the three High-Tech Enterprise R&D control modes (i.e. specialist control mode, bureaucratic control mode, and internal marketing management control mode) in five aspects, i.e. authority allocation, organizational management, R&D learning, R&D performance measure and control methods, and incentive mechanism. Then, we discuss the factors which influence HTE's selection of R&D control mode. Furthermore, we establish clusters of index to discriminate R&D control mode and measure influence factors, and then design a flexible model for R&D control mode selection. Finally, through the demonstration research, , we examine China's recent status quo of R&D control modes in High-Tech Enterprises, and prove that there are different R&D control modes in HTEs and the influence factor structures are diverse among different modes.