The Composition of R & D Units in West German Industry

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Abstract
It is widely assumed that industrial R & D units are composed of R & D professionals of different scientific disciplines, i.e. that such units have cross-disciplinary structures. However, empirical data on these structures are rare at best. This paper conceptualizes cross-disciplinarity as a dimension of an R & D unit's organizational complexity. Two measures of cross-disciplinary structures are developed to assess the relationships between cross-disciplinary structures, R & D unit size and industry in a comparative study of 210 West German industrial R & D units. One measure (number of different disciplines employed in a unit) has affinities with differentiation measures of prior organization research (e.g. the Aston approach), whereas a second distributional measure of disciplinary diversification has been rarely used. It is found that the two measures are differentially related to size and industry variables. Evidence is presented that the discovered lack of a relationship between R & D unit size and disciplinary diversification is theoretically interesting in that it can be used to explain why prior innovation research has found that smaller R & D units do not perform worse than larger units.