Developing Japan's R & D staff: in search of a new personnel management?

The traditional system of managing corporate manpower resources in Japan has fostered incremental innovation, diversification and organic growth. The establishment of R & D labs for frontier research has brought debate about the need to reform, or even abandon, traditional methods. The evidence to date suggests marginal rather than wholesale change.     

Individual differences and performance amongst R and D personnel: Some implications for management development

The literature on age and intelligence and scientific performance are briefly reviewed as a prelude to a more detailed consideration of recent work on the characteristics of innovative people. Attention is focussed on Kirton's measure of Innovation-Adaptation and a suggestion is made that it measures a mixture of level of creativity and style of innovation, and that future work should concentrate on developing the three sub-scales of originality, efficiency and rule-conformity. Some implications for the selection and development of R and D personnel are outlined.     

Technology development in developing countries: The case of a private R & D institution in Brazil

Research Development (RD) is concerned with the conversion of inventions (i.e. new ideas) into innovations (i.e. new products, processes and services in the market-place). Empirical evidence indicates that the rate of success of RD is small. In the innovation chain of events the scientific or technical accomplishment is but one link, a necessary but not sufficient condition of success. Often the market is the decisive factor.
Many research and development organizations (R & DOs), especially those funded privately, allocate their resources with a strong orientation towards satisfying perceived market needs. If this incentive persists during the R & D work the RD effort will probably be much facilitated.
In the light of the above concepts, the Brazilian R & D and RD experiences are reviewed with practical examples and emphasis on the efforts of Centro de Tecnologia Promon—CTP (Promon Technology Center). CTP works on non-conventional energy, industrial process development and telecommunication product development.
The experience reported is not intended to serve as a general solution to R & D or RD problems in the developing world. The purpose is rather to suggest alternative pathways and to point out the importance of a diversified approach to the tough task of closing the innovation loop.     

Coordination of multinational R & D: A Swedish case study

The need to coordinate multinational R & D increases in many corporations which want to take advantages of scale, synergy and multinationality on a world-wide basis. The Swedish engineering corporation SKF has tackled this problem as an early internationalized but lately diversified corporation working in mature technologies and markets. Substantial coordination has been achieved through a heavy resource commitment in a foreign corporate R & D lab, and a subsequent build-up of a rather elaborate system for R & D management throughout the corporation. The structure and processes of the system are described, together with experiences of coordinating effects, and a project case is given. The chosen mode of coordination is finally compared with situations in other industries.     

Urban food subsidies in the context of adjustment: The case of Zambia

One of the most complex policy issues facing many developing-country governments over the next decade, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, concerns the problem of providing the impoverished sections of urban populations with adequate food at prices they can afford, while both meeting the fiscal requirements of adjustment programmes and promoting domestic agricultural production. The pressure to reduce urban food subsidies is in many cases already immense, and the implications for urban household food security are considerable. This article looks at recent Zambian experience, and suggests that new and more efficient ways of targeting subsidies may be required if levels of food consumption are not to deteriorate still further.     

Unobserved heterogeneity and adjustment to behavioral bias: The case of used cars

With novel data on ex-post quality after used-car purchases, I evaluate left-digit bias, a type of inattention bias, for underlying quality of used cars. My main result is that the used-car market exhibits a quality discontinuity in parallel to a price discontinuity at 10,000 multiples of mileage. I discuss explanations for how quality adjusts to the price discontinuity. The explanations differentiate between exogenous and endogenous quality, and by the extent of the information asymmetry about quality. Quality assurance mechanisms, like used-car knowledge, trust, or recommendations, can reduce information asymmetry. Additional evidence on quality assurance shows that buyers use much more information — both before and after the purchase — than the pure inattention interpretation of left-digit-bias would suggest.     

An R & D planning and control servosystem: A case study*

This paper describes a planning and control system (PACS) to aid R & D decision-making which has been developed and used at the Monsanto Company, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. The planning model portion of the integrated system is a two-dimensional dynamic programming resource allocation algorithm which performs project selection, budgeting and scheduling. Behavioral parameters that can be used to simulate certain organizational factors are included in the planning model. The control model portion of the integrated system develops cost-effectiveness measures of variances between actual and planned performances for ongoing projects over time, which provide early warnings of pending project failures and guide control action. Applications of the system at Monsanto indicate that it significantly aids the development of satisfactory organizational decisions and also provides a laboratory for pretesting decisions.     

Assessment of profiles in R & D: a tool for analysis and development of R & D potential

A study sponsored by the State Committee for Science and Technical Progress of Bulgaria aimed at providing a theoretically sound and easy to apply method for the needs of R & D management on government, organization and team levels, to be used in assessing and managing both present and future R & D potential.
The method draws inferences about R & D potential from the accumulated experience and performance of the researchers, analysed along research topics. A specific 'man-topic unit of analysis helps identify individual researchers, teams and projects' profiles and also helps translate the specific characteristics of R & D work and the requirements for R & D internal effectiveness into the language of R & D management.     

The economics of industrial R & D

The relationship between research and commercial operation is examined in terms of production using a simple Cobb-Douglas production function, where output is expressed in terms of inputs of labour, capital and‘technical progress’. The model was tested in a single company environment by multiple regression analysis of output as the dependent variable on various measures of research, labour and capital. The results of the regression analysis are in full agreement with the model as outlined and the assumption that output is dependent simultaneously on labour, capital and the cumulative research investment.     

The Determinants of Innovation: R & D,Technology Transfer and Networking Effects

The traditional analysis of innovation has focused on the Schumpeterian hypothesis of a positive link between market power and innovation. This often includes an implicitly linear view of the innovation process, with R & D as a necessary first step. This paper widens the determinants of innovation beyond R & D to include technology transfer and networking effects, thus extending the standard Schumpeterian analysis. When tested on a dataset of c. 1300 UK manufacturing plants, R & D, technology transfer and networking are found to be substitutes in the innovation process, with the two latter intensities especially important in increasing the extent of innovation. There is no evidence that (actual) monopoly power increases the extent of innovation, but there are significant plant and sectoral effects on innovation.     

Ten years of R & D Management-some major themes: the role of communication in R & D

Fifteen papers on the role of interpersonal communication in R & D appearing in the first ten volumes of R & D Management are reviewed. The conclusions reached by the various contributors on three major themes are compared. The themes are: the relation of communication to performance, the effect of physical separation on communication rate, and the role of communication stars in information transfer. A clear division of opinion emerges on the extent to which managers can impose or create effective communication patterns as distinct from merely being able to stimulate those that already exist. Differences in experimental approach and the existence of methodological gaps prevent any judgment being made between the two viewpoints based only on the evidence in the papers under review.     

R and D tactics: applications of RPD decision analysis

Abstract: The application of RPD decision analysis to R & D tactics is discussed and the role of the technique as an aid to self-consistent decision making is enaphasized. RPD decision analysis is used to define limits to its own cost effectiveness.
Two example problems are analysed in detail. Simple priority ratings are defined for two special cases: the sequence of independent tests all of which must succeed, and the sequence of independent problem solving attempts, any of which may succeed. The compromise between project duration and project cost is analysed in terms of time dependence of the value of success.
The discrimination study is defined as an investigation which aims to provide information for an improved assessment of project success probability.
It is shown that such a study is never worth more than one quarter of the total expected benefits of the project.     

The information requirements of R & D management

This brief survey describes the role of R & D in industry, with particular respect to some of the requirements which its management has in order to fulfil its function effectively, more particularly in the field of information, bearing in mind that the product of R&D is yet more information, and that a very broad approach to the problems is required.     

The management of Army R & D projects

This study of the accuracy of cost and duration estimates for British defence R & D projects is based on an analysis of the records of 29 Army projects, initiated since 1960. The results are generally similar to American defence studies with which they are compared. The reasons for schedule slippages and cost escalations are examined and it is suggested that performance could be improved by more thorough project feasibility and definition studies and by a stronger project management organization.