Flexibility planning for managing R&D projects under risk

Incorporating managerial flexibility in an innovative R&D project is important, because managers face greater uncertainty in today's competitive and dynamic changing environment. It is essential to bring managerial flexibility into R&D project planning to decrease technical and market risks, while increasing potential market value. The objective of this paper is to develop a flexibility planning methodology based on real option analysis to improve managerial flexibility for R&D projects. The proposed methodology identifies potential risks that may occur during every R&D stage. It also recognizes a cascading option structure to resolve the identified risks, and evaluates and selects adequate options that maximize the potential value of the project. Instead of using a traditional option pricing method, a dynamic programming model that considers multidimensional product performance and market payoff is used to evaluate the R&D project value. Using the proposed methodology, managers can identify future scenarios as a function of their management actions. The proposed flexibility planning methodology can help managers improve managerial flexibility of R&D project and increase the success rate of product launch. A drug development project is used to illustrate the proposed methodology.