Applying Charles Ragin's Method of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to the Study of Technological Innovation
35 Pages Posted: 27 Mar 2008
Date Written: April, 2007
Abstract
The aim of this article is to demonstrate how Ragin's (2000) method of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) can be effectively employed to meet some of the current challenges in the study of innovation and project management. Chief among those are the need for holistic and multi-level investigations and the examination of sets of factors that explain outcomes in interaction terms. The paper analyzes the conjoint and simultaneous effect of ten formal and informal structural factors on the high and low success of six technologically innovative projects in a Research and Development (R&D) laboratory of a Fortune 500 company. To this end, I employ Ragin's methodology and social network analyses. The findings from the QCA minimization procedure identify a set of four critical project success factors.
Keywords: Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), Social network analysis (SNA), Technological innovation, R&D project success
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