Aknur Zhidebekkyzy

Project managers from different areas struggle to find universal set of factors to achieve high project efficiency. However, the project efficiency assessment varies across industries, making it difficult to apply general concepts and guidelines in the specific project environment. The study’s main purpose is to assess the impact of organizational support on project efficiency in different areas and identify critical processes that increase it. The paper presents quantitative research results by using data from 261 project managers in the Republic of Kazakhstan during 2018–2019. The research sample consists of commercialization projects, scientific projects, social projects, and projects from the service industry. The research findings show the different quality levels of top management support and its high correlation with project efficiency. Furthermore, the study reveals the specific processes for each investigated type of project that highly correlate with project efficiency dimensions. Commercialization projects that intensively use the organizational support processes were the most efficient projects by showing the best result in cost overrun (15%) and the second resulted in schedule overrun (17%). These findings have theoretical and practical implications, supporting project managers in increasing their project efficiency by choosing the critical, proper project management tools and techniques.

Innovations play an important role in achieving competitiveness and long-term economic growth at all levels of the economic hierarchy. More recently, the role of sustainability-oriented innovation in achieving economic growth has become equally important. However, there is a scientific debate about the possibility of effective commercialization of sustainability-oriented innovations. The existence of such scientific debate, as well as the absence of citation-based systematic literature reviews, became a prerequisite for conducting a comparative literature review of research on the effective commercialization of conventional and sustainability-oriented innovations. The purpose of the study is to conduct a comparative review and analysis of research on the commercialization efficiency of conventional and sustainability-oriented innovations. The analysis was conducted on the basis of a citation-based systematic literature review method. The results show that sustainable innovation research is more focused on the relationship between commercialization and firm performance. In the field of conventional innovations, research trends have shifted from studying the impact of technology transfer office (TTO) size, staffing, compensation practices to how strategic factors affect the efficiency of commercialization. In the area of sustainability-oriented innovation, the issues of the strategic orientation impact cause the most sustained interest, while managerial concerns and the stringency of environmental regulations have been actively explored in the past few years. It was revealed that the commercialization efficiency of sustainability-oriented innovations is characterized by so called sustainability-oriented criteria. A distinctive output criterion for commercialization efficiency of sustainability-oriented innovation is the improvement of the firm’s image. In addition, content analysis identified possible research directions to be investigated.