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This paper addresses the question of how projects are organized and how these management structures impact project success. Despite its widely accepted managerial importance, empirical studies could not provide significant evidence of a relationship between implemented management structures and project success. A major problem in finding meaningful empirical evidence is the conceptualization of the structure measure, which is derived from a typologist's perspective. In this study, we follow the taxonomists' perspective and empirically develop an alternative taxonomy of project management structures. We empirically compare both approaches, by using two different samples, collected in the United States and Germany, including together over 600 projects. Our empirical findings show that the validity of the widely accepted project organization typology is in question. The use of cluster analyses reveals an alternative taxonomy that encompasses five structural types, differentiated by the entities managing them: project coordinator, supervised project coordinator, autonomous project manager, supervised project manager, and autonomous functional project manager. The results strongly support the widely accepted proposition of a relationship between project organization and project success. The emerging taxonomy of project organization configurations enriches the theoretical and conceptual discussions of organizing projects and unravels the multiple aspects involved in organizing the execution of projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have debated the relative importance of technology push and demand pull policies in the adoption of environmental technologies. Here, we examine how internationally distributed technology push and demand pull policies interact to support the diffusion of a renewable energy technology. We analyze 40 years (1974–2013) of solar photovoltaic policies in three countries: USA, Germany, and China. We identify four phases of international policy interactions: in Phase 1 (1974–1990), the USA launched technology push policies; in Phase 2 (1991–2003), Germany pioneered demand pull policies; in Phase 3 (2004–2008), China responded to international market incentive programs with a scaling up of manufacturing; and in Phase 4 (2008–2013), Germany reduced whereas China increased demand policies. Our contributions are threefold: First, we demonstrate the importance of “manufacturing push” alongside the standard technology push and demand pull factors; second, we show how global adoption was spurred by the complementarity of policy efforts across national boundaries, while considering the tradeoffs in climate change policy between increasing global environmental welfare and improving national economic development; third, we demonstrate three generic patterns of cross-national policy complementarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shows the applicability of discriminant function between United States (US) and British and German R&D (research and development) projects. Description of R&D project termination; Purpose of study; Collection of data from these countries; Analysis of recurring set of variables in R&D project evaluation; Implications of the study for engineering management; Author's views on study; Discussion on discriminant analysis in appendix.