Ernø-kjølhede, Erik (Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School)
Abstract
The management of a research project is full of uncertainty and complexity. Research has substantial elements of creativity and innovation and predicting the outcome of research in full is therefore very difficult. In addition, the relationship between the research project manager and the project participants is characterised by an asymmetric distribution of knowledge where individual researchers know a lot more about the potential – negative and positive – of their research contributions than the project manager does. Furthermore, researchers in a project may have many competing demands on their time and they may find themselves competing against each other for individual scientific priority or the right to patent a research result. Given these and other inherent difficulties of managing a research project this paper addresses two questions in particular: 1) What kind of guidance may a research project manager get from existing project management literature? 2) What kinds of changes or additions are needed to build a project management model for research? In dealing with these questions the paper gives an outline of some of the basic tools and assumptions of existing project management theory and compares these to conditions in research. Based on this, the paper discusses the task of the research project manager and the interpersonal dynamics of a research team with a view to giving some pointers to what a research project manager can do to create the best possible conditions for a successful research project.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Copenhagen Business School, Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy in its series Working Papers with number
3/2000.
Length: 37 pages Date of creation: 01 Jan 2000 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:hhb:cbslpf:2000_003
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Blaagaardsgade 23 B, DK-2200 Copenhagen N, Denmark Phone: +45 3815 3815 Email: Web page: http://www.cbs.dk/departments/mpp/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Lars Nondal).
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)