Background and objective of the research ○ As economies become more knowledge-based, creation, diffusion, and application of knowledge have become key factors to the competitiveness. Especially, the importance of R&D, as a knowledge creating mechanism, has become more emphasized for the future socio-economic development. ○ However, if investments in R&D should be made solely by the private sector, socially desirable amount of R&D will not be invested. This is because the private rate of return on R&D, is, in general, smaller than the opportunity cost while the social rate of return on R&D tends to be larger than the opportunity cost. ○ Governments usually intervene in R&D to overcome so-called ‘market failures’, and to attain socially desirable R&D investment levels. Since the Korean government has introduced its first national R&D program in 1982, various Ministries have been investing into their own National R&D Programs with total amount of about 7,800 billion won as of 2005. ○ Recently, commercialization of outputs from the National R&D Programs have become one of the more important issues in Korean government policies. At the same time, other governments in OECD have increased their support for market oriented R&D. Research Scope ○ National R&D Programs can be defined as governmental activities to strategically allocate and invest R&D resources with long-term policy orientation and goals to obtain the scientific & technological competitiveness needed at the national level. ○ Since the mode and the target of managing the National R&D programs should be different according to the performing stages, distinctive management methods pertinent to each stage need to be developed. The performing stages of the National R&D programs would generally be defined to include those of R&D planning, selection, implementation, evaluation, and commercialization. Since the feasibility study is usually supposed to be performed both at the planning and the selection stages, the methodology to be developed in the research is also for the usage at these stages. Research limitations ○ In this research, we develop a methodology for the feasibility study confined to the national projects in the category of experimental development or technology development type R&D, especially large scale development projects. However, in order to prevent the waste of public R&D resources and to secure the accountability of public R&D investments as the size of national R&D programs has been enlarging, the feasibility evaluations are necessary for most of public R&D projects perform. Even though we deal with only one type of public R&D, in this research since the work is going to be too broad and requires too much resources if we are to consider all types of R&D projects, various distinguished methodologies for the feasibility evaluations according to the R&D types or characters should be developed sometime in the future. ○ Even though the guidelines suggested in this research deal with public governance and social feasibility, and economic feasibility as well as technological feasibility, the processes to derive the specific results for each aspect of feasibilities have not been provided. For example, benefit-cost ratio is suggested as one of factors to be considered for the economic feasibility, but the specific processes to derive benefit-cost ratios is not provided in this report. There could be various ways to define the benefit-cost ratio of a project depending on the type of the project and the determination of the discount rate, the time span, and the concept of benefit or cost, etc. Therefore, we leave this work of suggesting specific processes for a future research topic. ○ In this research, we try to develop an appropriate methodology for a feasibility study on large scale national R&D projects by reviewing current domestic and foreign feasibility evaluation systems through case analyses based on official documents from domestic and foreign national R&D management organizations especially about the process and the criteria for the feasibility evaluation at the planning and the selection stages. However, methodologies suggested in this research could be criticized in that they do not fully reflect the internal opinions or the know-how of the persons and the organizations directly concerned with the feasibility evaluation.