The R&D cycle: the influence of product and process R&D onshort-term ROI

The purposes of this paper are first to explore the relationship between the total R&D budget and two major components, product and process R&D, and second, to examine the relationship between these two types of R&D and the profitability of the business. The paper explores a cyclical pattern in the relationship between product and process R&D on the one hand and the short-term return on investment (ROI) of the business on the other hand. The total level of R&D investment plays a key role in this relationship. The foundation of this paper is based on prior work about the changing role of R&D over the life cycle of a new product or a new technology. It is also based on the notions of the S-curve response function and the limited compatibility between product and process R&D. The empirical part of the paper is derived from the PIMS database where the sampling units are strategic business units (SBUs). It is, therefore, different from studies where the focus of analysis is a single product or technology. Two forms of analysis are presented: correlation analysis of the hypothesized relationship and nonparametric tests of the stability of findings. The analysis assumes a lagged relationship between the investment in R&D and performance in terms of ROI. The primary conclusion is that product and process R&D modestly affect ROI two years later. The relationship appears to be different depending on the level of total R&D spending     

Determinants of Corporate R&D Investment: An Empirical Study Comparing Korea's IT Industry with Its Non‐IT Industry

In our study, we extracted the market, finance, and government factors determining R&D investment of individual firms in the IT industry in Korea. We collected the financial data of 515 individual firms belonging to IT and non‐IT industries between 1980 and 1999 from the Korea Investors Service's database and investigated the empirical relationship between the factors using an ordinary regression model, a fixed effects model, and a random effects model. The main findings of our study are as follows: i) The Herfindahl Index variable representing the degree of market concentration is statistically insignificant in explaining R&D expenditures in the IT manufacturing industry. ii) Assets, which is used as a proxy variable for firm size, have a positive and statistically significant coefficient. These two results suggest that the Schumpeterian Hypothesis may be only partially applied to the IT manufacturing industry in Korea. iii) The dividend variable has a negative value and is statistically significant, indicating that a tendency of high dividends can restrict the internal cash flow for R&D investment. iv) The sales variable representing growth potential shows a positive coefficient. v) The subsidy as a proxy variable for governmental R&D promotion policies is positively correlated with R&D expenditure. This suggests that government policy has played a significant role in promoting R&D activities of IT firms in Korea since 1980. vi) Using a dummy variable, we verified that firms reduced their R&D investments to secure sufficient liquidity under the restructuring pressure during Korea's 1998 and 1999 economic crisis.     

Careers: Where the Jobs Are

IEEE Spectrum teamed up with The New York Times to survey 752 IEEE members about the past, present, and future technological trends they are seeing. Rather than looking at industry statistics such as sales or market values, this paper focused on tracking research and development efforts across 19 technological areas as well as academia. This focus was chosen because, apart from the fact that R&D is specifically the work many engineers do to earn their living, R&D staffing and spending act as a general bellwether: declining investment in R&D typically indicates an area that isn't set for high growth or is experiencing commoditization of its products and the attendant squeezing of profit margins     

The effect of an investment tax credit on R and D spending

With calls occurring to the new US administration to reintroduce a capital investment tax credit, there is a need to evaluate its prospective effect on R&D expenditures. This paper explores the relationships among long-term trends in nonfederal R&D spending, and the external forces of a capital investment tax credit and a research and experimentation tax credit. Other forces over the last three decades which had been identified earlier, such as projected real interest rates, space expenditures, and oil price changes have been controlled for as intervening variables. While concluding that the underlying trend of increase in these expenditures is modestly over one percent, each of the other factors has significantly affected R&D spending: The investment tax credit has lowered R&D expenditure; while the research and experimentation credit has raised it. In the present economic climate and unemployment among engineers, continuation of the research and experimentation tax credit is supported. Equally, support should be rejected for the investment tax credit not only for its negative impact on R&D spending, but also because greater substitution of capital for labor sends the wrong message at a time of high overall unemployment     

国内外通信厂商在华研发现状及趋势

中国通信市场的快速发展使其成为国内外通信厂商关注的焦点,各厂商为了占领这个市场,都加大了各方面的投入力度,其中研究和开发方面的投入已成为通信厂商的一个重要竞争砝码。本文从人均研发投入、研发机构设置、研发重点、研发合作等方面对国内外通信厂商在中国大陆的研发状况进行了分析,并对未来的产品研发趋势做了总结。     

PCB新产品制造导入系统探讨

PCB研发管理日益规范、系统化,传统简单或粗放的新产品导入方法/机制难以满足国际市场化的要求。文章从新产品导入部门组织架构、新产品导入流程、新产品制作过程和品质管控等方面做系统介绍与探讨,供同行业参考。     

Managing the internationalization of R&D activities

The increasing dispersion of R&D laboratories in different countries force multinational firms to take a global view in managing their research operations and to make efforts to coordinate their dispersed R&D. Few studies have so far investigated whether or not international R&D structures exist, and how forms of division of labor, interdependencies, and coordination among geographically dispersed units take place. This paper proposes a taxonomy of international R&D structures and attempts to identify why and how they are designed as they are. It is based on the findings of field research on 12 multinational companies. It shows that the shape of the structure is dependent on the type of R&D activity, namely the longer time horizon of the research activity the more dispersed structure tend to be. Moreover, the structural outcome seems to be strongly influenced by two variables: the degree of dispersion of external sources of knowledge, and the degree of dispersion of the key internal R&D resources. These factors in turn are dependent on both industry- and firm-specific variables. This helps explain why the international R&D structural outcome varies from industry to industry and from firm to firm within the same industry     

Foreign R&D in the United States

A new study reveals a marked rise in US activity of R&D by foreign companies. How large is direct foreign investment in R&D in the USA? What exactly do these facilities research and develop? Why have non-US companies set up new operations or expanded existing facilities for R&D in the USA? How do these firms decide where to locate? To address these and related questions, the operations of over 50 European, Japanese, and South Korean R&D facilities were studied. All belong to the the electronics, biotechnology or automotive industries. The results of this study are analysed     

R&D/marketing communication during the fuzzy front-end

The planning stage of an innovation project has a great effect on the commercial performance of the project. During the “fuzzy front-end”, the organization formulates a concept of the product to be developed, and determines whether or not the organization will invest resources in the concrete development of the idea. The integration of R&D and marketing activities is a necessary condition for success in innovation projects. The research question of this study is: from an information processing perspective, what role does information transfer play in integrating R&D and marketing functions during the planning stage, and what effects do project formalization and project centralization of R&D and marketing planning activities have on the efficiency of marketing and technological uncertainty reduction? The authors use an ex post facto research design to test the propositional model. The findings show that successful project teams are characterized by a maximum uncertainty reduction during planning, i.e., by a maximum decrease of R&D and marketing task variability, and a maximum increase of R&D and marketing task analyzability. Information flows between these functions help them to achieve this efficient uncertainty reduction. While project centralization has a negative effect on efficient uncertainty reduction, project formalization is curvilinearly related to the amount of uncertainty reduced during planning     

回顾我国电信科研历程展望民族信息产业发展

本文回顾了近５０年来我国电信科研和产业的成果,重点介绍了列入国家计划的正在进行的课题,展望电信技术的发展方向和研究开发任务。     

Improving the R&D-production interface in industrial companies

Today, technological innovation is considered an essential component of corporate success. However, investment in R&D will result in innovative products only if research findings are transferred to production. This paper presents the results of a study on the barriers to and facilitators of this transfer process. Data were collected from 60 R&D division managers and 58 production managers from 61 companies in Brazil. Size of the R&D unit and the nature of the technology were considered in the analysis. Recommendations to improve the links between R&D and production are presented     

Why are small R&D organizations more productive?

Many R&D managers believe that small R&D organizations are more productive than large ones, a view that is reflected in the popular management literature of the 1980s. The author examines theoretical arguments for the possible advantages of smallness in R&D organizations, proposes an ideal product development organization using the techniques of control theory to simulate information flows, and compares the ideal model with survey data from five R&D organizations. Although direct contact with customers has been shown to be the best source of information about new product concepts, the majority of the product development engineers and engineering managers responding to a survey reported that they speak with customers either one or twice a year, or not at all. It is concluded that merely making R&D organizations small may prove disappointing unless careful attention is paid to organizational policies affecting communications flows, direct access to customers, opportunistic planning, and financial incentives for good performance     

Inventive payoff from R&D in Japanese industry: convergencewith the West

An attempt is made to determine if investment in R&D and the hiring of college-educated employees result in a higher rate of inventions. The relationship between the input of R&D and inventive output is studied in two samples of Japanese factories, 34 in 1982 and 44 in 1970. These results are compared with findings in a parallel American study. The correlations between R&D and inventive output are similar in Japan and America in the 1980s, despite some differences in the management of innovation in the two nations. Moreover, the most Westernized subsample of Japanese firms in the 1970s had correlations between R&D and invention similar to those observed in the American study. Thus, it is concluded that some degree of convergence may be taking place in R&D management strategies in the two nations     

Working for the govenment plan - As the EU?s Seventh Framework Programme grinds into action, we look at what it means and the key projects that will involve developments in the electronics and embedded systems environment

If the European Union has its way, 2007 will be a momentous year for research and development in Europe. It sees the start of the so-called Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), a six-year plan intended to move Europe towards the establishment of a knowledge-based economy. A key part of that policy is an effort, already under way to bring together industry academia and national and regional government to improve Europe's level of R&D investment, guided by what are known as European Technology Platforms (ETPs)     

A Study on Project Selection Framework for Future ICT Technologies

As the broadcasting communication R&D subject supported by the government is diversifying gradually, it becomes more difficult to prioritize investment of limited resources. In this respect, the importance of a strict and objective evaluation index for the national R&D project is growing much bigger in using available resources to achieve the corresponding goal by the R&D project. In addition, recently, the importance of a method to effectively express and evaluate achievement of targets, selection of projects and allocation of resources etc. in the whole process of the national R&D project is being emphasized for the scientific national R&D project. To improve efficiency and effectiveness of the process to select the broadcasting communication R&D project, therefore, this study would like to investigate methodologies and models to select projects including more systematic and scientific verification systems and indexes etc. for the R&D planning suitable for the broadcasting communication field focused on major precedent studies and advanced cases and to derive a method to improve them.     

转变产品研发体系推动电信企业转型

企业转型是商业模式的再设计,中国电信企业的传统商业模式已经不适应当前的商业环境,亟需创建成功的新商业模式,实现企业转型。对于当前的中国电信企业来说,转型成功的关键因素是实现从基于产品的研发体系到基于商业模式的产品研发体系的转变。基于商业模式的产品研发体系应与战略紧密结合,建立跨部门的合作机制和目标研发管理框架,并以客户为中心设计解决方案。     

纳米材料和纳米技术在印制线路板基材中的应用前景（8）——对PCB基材生命周期的影响

本文在PCB基材行业内较早地引入了基材的生命周期的概念,结合纳米技术和基材的生命周期的特点得出一个结论:基材产品有其固有的生命周期;纳米技术缩短了传统型覆铜板的生命周期,同时又预示着“新型”覆铜板的下一个生命周期的开始。对当前覆铜板的研发必须上升到这个层次来认识,否则会丧失战略上的主动权。     

Innovation strategy and the R&D-marketing interface in Japanesefirms: a contingency perspective

This study proposes a contingency model suggesting that a firm's strategic position will affect cross-functional involvement and information sharing between R&D and marketing departments in five major new product development stages, as well as the quality of R&D-marketing relations and organizational structure. To test the model, the authors surveyed 274 R&D managers and 264 marketing managers in 315 Japanese high-technology firms. The results indicate that, contrary to anecdotal suppositions of Japanese firm homogeneity, Japanese firms differ among themselves and among the strategic types in several important ways. The results also suggest that the level of R&D-marketing integration should be contingent on new product development strategy, making uniform promotion of cross-functional team integration questionable. Despite the differences in innovation strategy pursued by aggressive new product developers versus nonaggressive new product developers, all three strategic types rank the stages of innovation in a similar manner     

一种芯片研发项目度量

讨论了如何对IC项目和开发团队能力进行合理的度量和分析,以准确估计IC产品的交付情况,核心度量为项目进度、交付物规模、质量和成本。     

American optoelectronics: pavement for a bumpy economic road

The state of optoelectronics research and development (R&D) in the US is described, and forces that are altering the R&D environment are discussed. They are globalization, industry restructuring (mergers and takeovers), the divestiture of AT&T, and changing emphasis on national defense. The beleaguered but still solid US R&D infrastructure is examined. Optical-fiber-based technology is then considered with particular reference to current US-based fiber-optic activities, which are centered on standards and field trials. Future US prospects are evaluated