An Industrial Dynamic Approach to the Management of Research and Development

Abstract

Our intensive search for knowledge, basic and applied, must be accompanied by a corresponding search for the principles underlying the management of research and development. An attempt has been made here to seek out the factors of major importance and to organize them into a meaningful whole. Basic to this analysis have been the views of product value and cost as streams in time, and of managerial capabilities as probabilities of project completion, also varying in time. A simple model based on these concepts has been developed for a business in which the products are characterized by great complexity and by rapid change. The model is simply a tool to understanding-a way of looking at a business. Rational procedures have been derived for making certain the major project decisions.