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The paper develops a model for enhancing R&D productivity for Indian public funded laboratories. The paper utilizes the productivity data of five Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) laboratories for analysis and to form the constructs of the model.

The weighted average method was employed for analyzing the rankings of survey respondents pertaining to the significant measures enhancing R&D involvement of researchers and significant non-R&D jobs. The authors have proposed a model of productivity. Various individual, organizational and environmental constructs related to the researchers working in the CSIR laboratories have been outlined that can enhance R&D productivity of researchers in Indian R&D laboratories. Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to find the predictability of the productivity model.

The organizational factors have a crucial role in enhancing the R&D outputs of CSIR laboratories. The R&D productivity of researchers can be improved through implementing the constructs of the proposed model of productivity.

The R&D productivity model can be adapted by the R&D laboratories to enhance researchers’ R&D involvement, increased R&D outputs and achieving self-sustenance in long run.

The R&D laboratories can initiate exercises to explore the most relevant factors and measures to enhance R&D productivity of their researchers. The constructs of the model can function as a guideline to introduce the most preferable research policies in the laboratory for overall mutual growth of laboratory and the researchers.

Hardly any studies have been found that have focused on finding the measures of enhancing R&D involvement of researchers and the influence of significant time-intensive jobs on researchers’ productivity.

Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)–National Metallurgical Laboratory (CSIR–NML) has launched a number of initiatives in different perspectives of e-Government. The “Mandays-Involvement” website was implemented by the laboratory in Government-to-Employee (G2E) perspective i.e. facilitating its research and development (R&D) manpower by providing data with respect to their own performance parameters through a single window. The development and implementation of the website had two major objectives : (1) to provide a system to the researchers for tracking and improving their own performance with respect to mandays and external cash flow generation and (2) to equip the management with a tool to enhance the organizational performance and enable optimum employee utilization.

Software Development Life Cycle approach was followed for the web-based system development and iterative model was used. Open source web development tools i.e. Php, My-Sql and CSS were used for the system development.

The new system helped in detailed profiling of current and future assignment of the researchers so as to have a check over preference-based allocation of work and providing equal opportunities of work to all.

The percentage average mandays utilization was stabilized after the implementation of the website. The percentage under and over engagements of researchers in R&D projects was controlled and reduced.

The system outputs are utilized for R&D Team formation, Project approvals and Annual Performance Evaluations.

This new information system acts as a decision support system that helps the management to align its organizational policies toward the Future Research Projects and R&D manpower.

This paper intends to explore the measure for aligning the goals of researchers toward achieving organizational R&D targets. The paper also explores the significance and ordering of R&D outputs and the factors that influence generation of R&D outputs, from the perspective of researchers working in the Indian public sector organizations.

Data were collected in five Indian R&D laboratories, and weighted average method Spearman correlation coefficient and rank regression were utilized for the analysis.

The findings indicated that various groups of researchers prefer to target different R&D outputs and not all the factors are considered as equally significant in influencing the generation of R&D outputs. Further, the R&D organization should include preferred real factors while policy making for achieving collaborative efforts toward fulfilling organizational objectives. The set of selected R&D outputs and influencing factors were also ordered according to the average rankings given by the researchers.

The findings can help R&D managers to identify the expectations of the researchers and include their preferences in R&D Planning. The study could be extended to a larger dataset of researchers working in other government as well as private R&D organizations.

Hardly any studies were found that explored the preferences of researchers with respect to R&D outputs and influencing factors with respect to the Indian public sector R&D laboratories.

The effect of global integration of businesses and interchange of ideas and technology through internet has many facets. Increase in economic recessions and decrease in research funding has forced both private and public sector research organizations to introduce measures of self-sustainability. Enhancing research and development (R&D) productivity of researchers can be one of those measures. The purpose of this paper is to attempt toward identifying and analyzing those factors of productivity that may be related to the manpower in R&D.

Based upon the theoretical background and the nature of data available, this empirical study has been carried out as a case study for a public sector research laboratory. The extent of involvement in research projects have been analyzed with respect to the R&D outputs generated by the researchers, which if found to be positively related, may be focussed upon, for increasing productivity of manpower in R&D. Several other determinants of R&D productivity were identified from the literature review and were analyzed in association with the “involvement.” “Robust Regression” technique was used for the statistical analysis.

It was found that the R&D productivity of researchers has a positive correlation with their extent of involvement in the R&D projects.

The result may help in creation of the policies for enhancing organizational self-sustainability.

Several prior studies have been conducted with different determinants of R&D productivity but hardly any studies were found considering “extent of manpower involvement in research projects.” This study can be useful for public sector research organizations to relate the findings with their endeavors of enhancing R&D productivity.