Success factors for technology development of bio refinery & bio energy technologies at ECN

Success factors for technology development of bio refinery & bio energy technologies at ECN

Pierik, K.S.

Scholten, V.E. (mentor)
Stikkelman, R.M. (mentor)
Van Beers, C.P. (mentor)

Technology, Policy and Management

Economics of Technology and Innovation

Systems Engineering Policy Analysis and Management

2014-08-26

There is an abundance of research on success factors for R&D projects. Most authors have attempted to create a universal list of critical success factors, but different authors have found that the magnitude of significance and the direction of influence vary. Most studies have made no distinction between projects, and often neglected the context in which a project is implemented and differences in relative importance of success factors between stages of a project life cycle. This thesis undertook a review of existing literature on success factors for R&D projects and proposed a different approach to find success factors under case specific conditions. This research focused on technology development projects of bio refinery and bio energy technologies at the Energy research Center of the Netherlands and proposed a list of key success factors per stage in the project life cycle. The method used to derive this list is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process method. A case study showed a large overlap between what was considered to be important for project success in that specific case and the list of key success factors derived from the AHP analysis. However, this case study also showed that even the smallest case specific conditions have their influence on what is considered to be important for success.The method proposed in this thesis can be applied to other research institutes as well, since it makes use of the experience of local experts who work on development projects on a regular basis. Further research is proposed for the categorization element of the proposed method, for the project life cycle, and for further evaluation of the validity of this method.

technology development projects
success factors
research institutes
R&D projects

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b8de9be4-bc7e-4ae4-825b-def28367fadd

2016-08-26

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2014 Pierik, K.S.