CHAPTER 7

OPERATIONS RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS TO

EV ALUATION OF R&D PROJECTS
Stuart Bretschneider
Center for Technology and Information Policy
The Maxwell School
Syracuse University

INTRODUCTION

Over the past forty years, the field of Operations Research has applied the
"scientific method" towards the solution of practica! problems faced by modern
organizations. Operations Research has developed techniques for analyzing and
prescribing actions in a wide array of problems areas. The core of these
techniques include a series of model which focus on resource allocation,
scheduling and selection decisions. Many of these models have been applied to
the management of R & D projects.

This chapter critically reviews the techniques and models from Operations
Research which have been applied to evaluation of R & D projects. Focusing
on project evaluation requires that an important distinction be made between ex
an te and ex post project evaluation. Ex an te evaluation occurs prior to initiation
of the research or development activity. The principle utility of ex ante
evaluation is in selecting projects. Operations Research's major contributions to
R & D management has been through ex ante project evaluation and application

B. Bozeman et al. (eds.), Evaluating R&D Impacts: Methods and Practice

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1993
124 Operations Research Contributions to Evaluation of R&D Projects

of ex ante evaluation to formal models designed to support project selection

decision making. Ex post evaluation occurs after a project has been completed
and therefore focuses on outcomes and impacts. Though less work has been
done in this domain, several Operations Research techniques provide insights into
ex post evaluation.

The next section reviews ex ante evaluation techniques found in the OR

literature. This review will separate out approaches designed to assign value to
projects, what Baker has called benefit measures (Baker and Freeland 1975),
from formal decision models designed to focus on resource allocation once
projects have been assigned values. This section will also discuss how social
science research is appropriate to the development of OR models. Section three
focuses on ex post evaluation techniques, particularly emphasizing recent
development designed to quantify comparative efficiency across multiple decision
units. This is followed by a critica! review of the techniques, including a review
of current practice in government and industry. This section will also provide
suggestions for future research.

EX ANTE EV ALUATION

Ex ante models are primarily prescriptive models for aiding in real decision
making. Typically these models require both a mechanism for generating
commensurate valuations for each R & D project, as well as a component to
describe resource requirements and interactions between projects effecting
resource utilization. Both parts of the model are then used to select project and
plan for resource allocation over selected projects. This section is divided into
a review of valuation approaches, a section reviewing the structure of the
different models for making resource allocation decisions and contributions from
the social sciences to understanding research management. The review of
valuation techniques is organized into three subsections; models that develop a
measure of value through a comparative technique, those that are based on
obtaining a multidimensional score, and finally those techniques that link a
projects value to the overall economic objective of the firm or organization.
Research allocation models are organized into those that make use of the
constrained optimization paradigm central to most of OR, those models that
attempt to emulate organizational and human processes and those that are
primarily ad-hoc in nature. The final section will focus on how relevant social
science research has enhanced the quality of OR models.

Figure 1 provides a complete list of ex ante evaluation research since 1959.

The figure organizes the bulk of the ex ante R&D project evaluation literature
and provides a guide to the layout of this section of the paper.