CIRJE-J-67. Takahashi, Nobuo, Kenichi Kuwashima and Masaki Tamada, "R&D Performance and Gatekeepers", February 2002.

There is a difference between Japanese pharmaceutical companies and Merck in the research and development style. The difference between both can be simplified down to the existence of the gatekeeper managers. The innovation research was based on the implicit premise that the gatekeeper had some merit. Then it was not clarified how the organizational performance changed when the gatekeeper existed. As a result of our agent-based simulation, it is proven that gatekeeper managers observed in Merck contribute to the start-up speed of the projects and the idea quantity. In the actual research and development process, the phenomena linked with our simulation results are observed. From this new viewpoint, we try to analyze the case of Merck whether the start-up speed becomes the competitive advantage in research and development or not.