Government-engineered R&D consortia are key carriers of national strategic scientific and technological strength. However, existing research neglects the unique bi-decoupling problem in government-engineered R&D consortia—coexistence of ‘public mission-innovative objective’ decoupling at the strategic level and ‘innovative objective-means’ decoupling at the operational level. By introducing the bi-decoupling problem as the core issue in the research on government-engineered R&D consortia, this study builds an analysis framework around this issue. Using this framework, this study focuses on the relatively neglected ‘promotion mechanism’ and discusses the critical factors inducing the two dimensions of bi-decoupling, the targeting governance mechanism, and the means to deal with these factors.