Metabolism of Public Research and R&D Management Implications: How Labs Consume Resources

Abstract

A fundamental problem in the field of R&D management is how public research laboratories consume resources to produce scientific research and operations. The study confronts this problem here by developing a model of metabolism of research labs, which endeavours to analyze the behavior of public research lab consumption and production considering the flux of funding for research. In particular, research lab metabolism is the metabolic processes by which research labs transform funding for research, materials and human energy to produce scientific outputs. This approach is applied on one of the biggest European public research organization, analyzing data of balance sheets from 1997 to 2015. Statistical analysis reveals that funding for research (state subsidy and contracts) of the public research organization under study are mainly consumed for the cost of personnel with high growth rates of 167.87% over 1997–2015 period, whereas the growth rate of the total revenue is roughly of 118.72% in the same period. This disproportionate growth of the cost of personnel seems to generate problems of long-term sustainability of some public research labs and organizational inefficiencies. This approach here based on metabolic processes of public research organizations suggests useful linkages among economic, human, and technical infrastructure resources of research labs in order to explain managerial and organizational behavior and sustain their functions over time. Some possible environmental and organizational causes of this labor-intensive metabolism of public research bodies are discussed and R&D management implications are suggested.