Principal Investigators and R&D Failure : Probability of Innovation Failure in Small Business

Failure in R&D efforts are fairly common and with many factors that contribute to the outcome. This book focuses on the role of principal investigators (PIs) in R&D project failures and provides a theoretical model explaining how firm characteristics, including those of the PIs, impact the probability of failure. The theoretical model also serves as a structural form model to motivate the empirical analysis which assesses the probability of failure in small technology-based firms. The author uses data from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to build a new and informative tool to assess R&D projects and demonstrate the strengths of the theoretical model. The association between PIs and R&D failure not only provides insights that can have a downstream impact to economic growth, but it can also provide policymakers with valuable information to aid decisions in allocating funds for R&D.

Morgan Boyce is an adjunct faculty member in the Economics Department at the Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina at Charlotte (USA). Dr. Boyce has worked in the financial services industry for 15 years and held positions related to economic research and modeling, risk management, data science, and analytics. In addition to his work in the finance industry, his research interests are in innovation economics and entrepreneurship with a focus on factors associated with the success or failure of small entrepreneurial firms.