Regulatory Feedback and Adaptive Constraints in Publicly Funded R&D Project Management Systems: A Multicriteria Decision Analysis

Publicly funded R&D projects operate within regulatory and organisational contexts that shape how change is planned and managed, yet the system-level effects of these frameworks remain underexplored. This study examines how regulatory requirements shape change management in publicly funded R&D projects, using Spanish technology centres as a setting. It identifies the constraints affecting change management, prioritises their perceived impact among project managers, and examines how these constraints generate regulatory feedback that conditions both project design and execution-stage change decisions. A mixed-method approach combines semi-structured expert interviews with a structured survey of 38 R&D project managers. Quantitative and qualitative evidence is integrated through the Analytic Hierarchy Process to structure and rank perceived regulatory constraints. The results show that administrative procedures and regulatory requirements are perceived as the most restrictive factors, especially for scope adaptation, administrative workload, and temporal flexibility, reducing managers’ capacity to adjust projects under execution uncertainty. The empirical context reflects regulatory principles and control mechanisms consistent with the European Union framework for state aid to R&D. This study clarifies how regulation interacts with project management practice, showing that control-oriented procedures act as the dominant adaptive constraint, generating regulatory feedback that discourages change requests and systematically reduces projects’ adaptability during execution.