Bibliometric analysis on additionality of Japanese R&D programmes

Abstract

To justify public investment in R&D activities especially those conducted by private companies, the effect to change their behavior into what could not be realized without public funds is required. This paper studies the "additionality" of Japanese R&D programmes by analyzing the patent applications of five case study projects. Changes and continuations in research themes between the results of the project and the results in five years before and after the project were measured using a similarity index. Also, the similarities between research groups in a project were measured. These show how each project was constituted by researchers with various types of knowledge. As a result, although all projects contained core research groups who continued their research in the project, the effect of mobilizing other researchers into new fields was shown to vary depending on the characteristics of the projects.