The impact of R&D team diversity to R&D performance: KIST case

The production of scientific knowledge has been changed from a research process largely based on the activities of individual researcher to collative efforts of R&D teams. This shift brings a new question for the effect of team composition to scientific knowledge production. Based on knowledge base theory, diversity of R&D team is key factor of R&D output production. However, most of researches focused the effect of disciplinary diversity, and there is few attentions to the effect of education level diversity or hierarchical diversity. In this paper, we find that i) age diversity in a research team is negatively associated with R&D performance, ii) the ratio of permanent research is positively associated with R&D performance, iii) there is optimal level of collaboration. Thus, it can be concluded that diversity of R&D team can affect to R&D performance.