A Quantitative Analysis of Bottleneck Displacement in Corporate R&D Governance

In this era of rapid innovation, it is critical to balance speed and agility of R&D with governance and review. While protracted turnaround time (TAT) in governance processes may stifle rapid innovation, insufficient review may result in an underdeveloped product. This paper presents a case study of a R&D ethics review process in a Japanese digital conglomerate. This study examines the efficiency, measured by median TAT, of an 11-step ethics review process, across two 12-month periods, with consistent requirements and standards. This study identified that the New Submissions achieved a 35% efficiency gain, while Revisions and Change Requests suffered a 50% and 67% increase in TAT, respectively. Moreover, this study found out that review reports for New Submissions are longer even as TAT improved, hence the possibility of reduced reviewer thoroughness has been ruled out. However, review report length for Revisions remained static despite a 50% increase in TAT, suggesting that this delay was driven by administrative bottlenecks, rather than task complexity. Thus, while operational streamlining effort within the framework successfully reduced TAT in high-priority intakes without compromising content depth, it inadvertently created friction for iterative review. Consequently, this study recommends implementing granular fine-tuning to align process rigor with transaction complexity and risk profile.