research and development

Introduction

abbreviation  R and D,  or  R & D,  

      in industry, two intimately related processes by which new products and new forms of old products are brought into being through technological innovation.

Introduction and definitions

       research and development, a phrase unheard of in the early part of the 20th century, has since become a universal watchword in industrialized nations. The concept of research is as old as science; the concept of the intimate relationship between research and subsequent development, however, was not generally recognized until the 1950s. Research and development is the beginning of most systems of industrial production. The innovations that result in new products and new processes usually have their roots in research and have followed a path from laboratory idea, through pilot or prototype production and manufacturing start-up, to full-scale production and market introduction. The foundation of any innovation is an invention. Indeed, an innovation might be defined as the application of an invention to a significant market need. Inventions come from research—careful, focused, sustained inquiry, frequently trial and error. Research can be either basic or applied, a distinction that was established in the first half of the 20th century.

      Basic research is defined as the work of scientists and others who pursue their investigations without conscious goals, other than the desire to unravel the secrets of nature. In modern programs of industrial research and development, basic research (sometimes called pure research) is usually not entirely “pure”; it is commonly directed toward a generalized goal, such as the investigation of a frontier of technology that promises to address the problems of a given industry. An example of this is the research being done on gene splicing or cloning in pharmaceutical company laboratories.

      Applied research carries the findings of basic research to a point where they can be exploited to meet a specific need, while the development stage of research and development includes the steps necessary to bring a new or modified product or process into production. In Europe, the United States, and Japan the unified concept of research and development has been an integral part of economic planning, both by government and by private industry.

History and importance

      The first organized attempt to harness scientific skill to communal needs took place in the 1790s, when the young revolutionary government in France was defending itself against most of the rest of Europe. The results were remarkable. Explosive shells, the semaphore telegraph, the captive observation balloon, and the first method of making gunpowder with consistent properties all were developed during this period.

      The lesson was not learned permanently, however, and another half century was to pass before industry started to call on the services of scientists to any serious extent. At first the scientists consisted of only a few gifted individuals. Robert W. Bunsen, in Germany, advised on the design of blast furnaces. William H. Perkin, in England, showed how dyes could be synthesized in the laboratory and then in the factory. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), in Scotland, supervised the manufacture of telecommunication cables. In the United States, Leo H. Baekeland, a Belgian, produced Bakelite, the first of the plastics. There were inventors, too, such as John B. Dunlop, Samuel Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell, who owed their success more to intuition, skill, and commercial acumen than to scientific understanding.

      While industry in the United States and most of western Europe was still feeding on the ideas of isolated individuals, in Germany a carefully planned effort was being mounted to exploit the opportunities that scientific advances made possible. Siemens, Krupp, Zeiss, and others were establishing laboratories and, as early as 1900, employed several hundred people on scientific research. In 1870 the Physicalische Technische Reichsanstalt (Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology) was set up to establish common standards of measurement throughout German industry. It was followed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (later renamed the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science), which provided facilities for scientific cooperation between companies.

      In the United States, the Cambria Iron Company set up a small laboratory in 1867, as did the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1875. The first case of a laboratory that spent a significant part of its parent company's revenues was that of the Edison Electric Light Company, which employed a staff of 20 in 1878. The U.S. National Bureau of Standards was established in 1901, 31 years after its German counterpart, and it was not until the years immediately preceding World War I that the major American companies started to take research seriously. It was in this period that General Electric, Du Pont, American Telephone & Telegraph, Westinghouse, Eastman Kodak, and Standard Oil set up laboratories for the first time.

      Except for Germany, progress in Europe was even slower. When the National Physical Laboratory was founded in England in 1900, there was considerable public comment on the danger to Britain's economic position of German dominance in industrial research, but there was little action. Even in France, which had an outstanding record in pure science, industrial penetration was negligible.

       World War I produced a dramatic change. Attempts at rapid expansion of the arms industry in the belligerent as well as in most of the neutral countries exposed weaknesses in technology as well as in organization and brought an immediate appreciation of the need for more scientific support. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in the United Kingdom was founded in 1915, and the National Research Council in the United States in 1916. These bodies were given the task of stimulating and coordinating the scientific support to the war effort, and one of their most important long-term achievements was to convince industrialists, in their own countries and in others, that adequate and properly conducted research and development were essential to success.

      At the end of the war the larger companies in all the industrialized countries embarked on ambitious plans to establish laboratories of their own; and, in spite of the inevitable confusion in the control of activities that were novel to most of the participants, there followed a decade of remarkable technical progress. The automobile, the airplane, the radio receiver, the long-distance telephone, and many other inventions developed from temperamental toys into reliable and efficient mechanisms in this period. The widespread improvement in industrial efficiency produced by this first major injection of scientific effort went far to offset the deteriorating financial and economic situation.

      The economic pressures on industry created by the Great Depression reached crisis levels by the early 1930s, and the major companies started to seek savings in their research and development expenditure. It was not until World War II that the level of effort in the United States and Britain returned to that of 1930. Over much of the European continent the depression had the same effect, and in many countries the course of the war prevented recovery after 1939. In Germany Nazi ideology tended to be hostile to basic scientific research, and effort was concentrated on short-term work.

      The picture at the end of World War II provided sharp contrasts. In large parts of Europe industry had been devastated, but the United States was immensely stronger than ever before. At the same time the brilliant achievements of the men who had produced radar, the atomic bomb, and the V-2 rocket had created a public awareness of the potential value of research that ensured it a major place in postwar plans. The only limit was set by the shortage of trained persons and the demands of academic and other forms of work.

      Since 1945 the number of trained engineers and scientists in most industrial countries has increased each year. The U.S. effort has stressed aircraft, defense, space, electronics, and computers. Indirectly, U.S. industry in general has benefited from this work, a situation that compensates in part for the fact that in specifically nonmilitary areas the number of persons employed in the United States is lower in relation to population than in a number of other countries.

      Outside the air, space, and defense fields the amount of effort in different industries follows much the same pattern in different countries, a fact made necessary by the demands of international competition. (An exception was the former Soviet Union, which devoted less R and D resources to nonmilitary programs than most other industrialized nations.) An important point is that countries like Japan, which have no significant aircraft or military space industries, have substantially more manpower available for use in the other sectors. The preeminence of Japan in consumer electronics, cameras, and motorcycles and its strong position in the world automobile market attest to the success of its efforts in product innovation and development.

Types of laboratories

Company laboratories

      Company laboratories fall into three clear categories: research laboratories, development laboratories, and test laboratories.

      Research laboratories carry out both basic and applied research work. They usually support a company as a whole, rather than any one division or department. They may be located at a considerable distance from any other part of the company and report to the highest levels of corporate management or even to the board of directors. AT&T Bell Laboratories, the research arm of American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T), is an outstanding example. There the transistor and coaxial cable were developed, pioneer work in satellite communications was carried out, and many computer innovations have been developed.

      Development laboratories are specifically committed to the support of particular processes or product lines. They are normally under the direct control of the division responsible for manufacture and marketing and are often located close to the manufacturing area. Frequently used as problem solvers by many sections of each company, development laboratories maintain close contacts with people in manufacturing, advertising, marketing, sales, and other departments with responsibilities for products or processes.

      Test laboratories may serve a whole company or group of companies or only a single manufacturing establishment. They are responsible for monitoring the quality of output. This often requires chemical, physical, and metallurgical analyses of incoming materials, as well as checks at every stage of a process. These laboratories may be a part of a manufacturing organization, but many companies give them an independent status.

Government laboratories

      The pattern followed by different countries varies widely. The general policy of the U.S (United States). government has been not to set up laboratories of its own, even for military work, but to offer research and development contracts, usually on the basis of competitive bidding, to private companies. The most important reason for this has been a belief that the right place to develop equipment is very close to the place at which it will eventually be manufactured.

      There are exceptions to the rule. One is the type of laboratory represented by the National Bureau of Standards, a central authority on problems of measurement and standardization. Another is the type of laboratory supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, set up by the government in the belief that research in this field is necessary but that the industry had neither the finances nor the organization to maintain it. The continuing support of successive administrations has resulted in a large and authoritative body carrying out research over a wide field for the benefit of the farming community and thus, indirectly, of the whole nation.

      A third type of government laboratory is represented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and its successors, the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Research. In this case the U.S. government recognized a situation of potential danger and also opportunity of such a nature that it was not practicable for it to be handled by private individuals. It therefore set up a body to deal with the situation, allocating funds directly and maintaining close control of the objectives and timing of research. A similar challenge is faced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Although much of the detailed research and development work is contracted to private industry, overall control, as well as much of the most important work, is handled directly by the central organization.

      A different type of policy has been followed in the United Kingdom. A chain of government laboratories supports the requirements of the armed forces and carries out a great deal of the basic and applied research from which new weapons and military techniques emerge. The government laboratories play a major part in negotiating and monitoring the contracts placed with private industry for the eventual development and production of equipment for the armed forces.

      In addition to the government laboratories that focus on military R and D, the U.K. government supports civilian establishments such as the National Engineering Laboratory. These have a considerable degree of independence in selecting projects that will bring the greatest benefit to industry as a whole, and their results are made available to all. They maintain close liaison with the research associations (see below Research associations (research and development)) and with private industry and attempt to concentrate their work in areas that for one reason or another are not covered elsewhere.

      In Germany, as in the United Kingdom, defense research is the responsibility of a chain of government laboratories, but they are much smaller. Most of the work is done for them on contract by the research associations. They place very little research with private industry and call upon it only in the later stages of development.

      In Japan there is a chain of laboratories that serves the needs of government departments. They work closely with the research associations that support particular industries. The military laboratories carry out the bulk of defense research and development themselves, and they are also responsible for the placing of contracts with private industry. These are usually confined to the later stages of development and are expected to lead almost directly to production.

      The French system is similar, but the directly controlled government laboratories are even smaller and do little more than direct and coordinate work done by the research associations.

      In spite of differences in organization, the day-to-day conduct of government-sponsored research and development in all countries has much in common. In every case, a comparatively small number of government employees keep in constant touch with the whole of the scientific and technical community and dispense contracts in the way they consider will make the best use of the resources available in the broad national interest. The fact that in some countries it is done in laboratories under direct governmental control, in others in those under private control, and in yet others in those in which responsibility is split is of secondary importance. In every case, government support is important. Even in the United States, with its relatively few government laboratories, government research contracts account for almost half of all R and D expenditures.

Independent laboratories

      The concept of a laboratory that maintains itself solely by selling research originated with the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh before World War I. The difficulties that have to be faced are formidable, for a great deal of research work yields no immediate or obvious reward, and it is extremely difficult to satisfy customers that they are getting value for their money. Nevertheless, a number of such bodies, including the Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio, and the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), Menlo Park, Calif., have become large and successful. These organizations offer the services of workers of high professional standing who cover between them a wide range of disciplines. They undertake studies and investigations on any subject within their competence for fees that are negotiated with each customer; and, although they do not expect to make profits, they are required to be self-supporting.

      Another type of organization is represented by Arthur D. Little, Inc., Cambridge, Mass., which is run on strictly commercial lines, seeking to make a commercially viable profit from the resources employed. Only one or two organizations of similar type have been established in western Europe, and they have not grown to a size comparable with those in America.

      Both in Europe and in the United States, there are a great number of small laboratories providing specialist analytical, spectrographic, metallurgical, and similar services to industry. Most of their clients are companies that lack adequate facilities of their own and that in the course of time either learn to stand on their own feet or go out of business. But the constant appearance of new companies and the increasing need for technical understanding in established companies results in a slow but steady increase in the number of independent specialist laboratories serving them.

Research associations

      A more important part of the industrial research and development effort in western Europe and in Japan is represented by research associations. Most of these organizations are concerned with a single industry. Examples are the British Glass Industry Research Association in Sheffield, the French Petroleum Institute in Paris, the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf, and the Textile Research Institute in Yokohama. These laboratories are mainly concerned with the long-term problems of the industries they serve, but they are on occasion called in to help with immediate technical difficulties beyond the powers of local staff. In European countries other than the United Kingdom, they carry out substantial work under contract to the defense departments.

University laboratories

      In principle, university laboratories are completely independent and free to investigate anything that interests them. In practice, many of them are anxious to keep in touch with industry and to focus their research effort on problems with practical applications. Similarly, industrial scientists wish to maintain contact with advanced academic research. The result is a constant interchange between universities and industry; industrialists suggest problems for university research and provide funds to support it, and university staffs act as consultants and advisers to industry. In addition, government may play a direct role by funding university research in a wide variety of specialities and research areas.

The role of government

      World War I brought home to every government involved the importance of having its armed forces supported by an industry using the most advanced scientific techniques. Since then it has been generally accepted that it is frequently desirable to encourage research and development for reasons of economic growth as well as national security. This has resulted in massive support from public funds for many sorts of laboratories.

      Through World War II this support was limited to research and development of direct military significance, but in more recent years the types of equipment used by the armed forces have become so extensive and so complicated that it is no longer practicable to distinguish between the requirements of an efficient armament industry and those of an efficient civilian industry. Advanced communication systems, aircraft engines, computers, and nuclear power generators have been just as important to one as to the other. This fact has led governments to become the greatest single sponsors of industrial research.

      During the 1960s it became clear that the “spin-off,” or civilian and commercial application of work done under government contracts for defense or space research and development, was giving the industries who participated a crucial advantage over their competitors, particularly over those in countries in which comparable assistance was not available. The dominance of U.S. firms in computer development and in microelectronics was generally attributed to this cause, and the outstanding success of the British aeroengine industry could hardly have been achieved without it. There were obvious examples, such as communication satellites, which derived from work on military rocket propulsion, and more subtle ones, such as the highly reliable electronic components, developed to make communication with and control of space vehicles more reliable, that made it possible to produce television sets with far longer life between failures. The reaction of most industrial countries was to increase government support of private research. In the United Kingdom the Ministry of Technology took responsibility for allocating funds to private industry for research projects with no direct military application. The usual practice has been to contribute 50 percent of the cost of the work, the private company providing the balance.

      In the United States and in most western European countries, research contracts placed by government departments originate in the decision of a scientifically or technically oriented executive of the department that certain work should be done. This leads to the preparation of a specification of the work, which is then offered to industry, to private research institutes, and to universities for competitive bidding.

      The terms of contract have varied widely. It is common to offer contracts on a cost-plus basis. The contractor keeps records of the hours worked by the staff and the materials used; these are checked by government auditors and paid for at a negotiated rate, together with a fixed percentage as profit. Criticisms of this system led to fixed-price contracts, but these have the drawback that it is often so difficult to define the end point of a research contract that the contractor can treat a fixed-price agreement as if it were cost-plus. Another problem is that, when the end point can be exactly defined but there are genuine uncertainties in the program, the most attractive bid may come from a contractor who, through ignorance, takes too light a view of the difficulties. Yet another formula that has been tried is to offer contracts on a cost-plus-fixed-profit (rather than cost-plus-percentage) basis.

      In all these cases the main concern of the agency that sponsors the contract is to get the work done as efficiently as possible. With the many uncertainties of research and development, true economy is more likely to lie in high-quality work than in low pricing. Consequently, in every country in which the government is a substantial supporter of private research and development, the departments concerned have set up elaborate systems of monitoring work and of keeping in touch with the performance and capabilities of the companies willing to undertake it. In negotiating contracts, the sponsors attempt to place them where they will be handled most successfully. At the same time, they are concerned to keep together teams that are likely to do good work for them in the future. Within this framework the struggle of the customer to negotiate the best price for a project and that of the contractor to get a good return for the commitment of valuable resources follow normal commercial practice.

       patent rights are often a complex issue when research is carried out by private industry but paid for, at least partially, by government. In some cases the rights are the exclusive property of the government, and in others they belong to the contractor. A common compromise is for the government to retain all rights when anyone uses the patents to supply a government department but for the contractor to retain them when another party is involved. Thus, the government can place production orders with any contractor that it chooses, and the company that carried out the development is obliged to release information to him. If, however, the new contractor wishes to sell in the open market, he is obliged to negotiate a license and pay a royalty to the original development laboratories.

The management of research and development activities

      Most research and development projects are examples of a project, or one-shot, production system. Here, as opposed to the ongoing activity found in batch or continuous systems, resources are brought together for a period of time, focused on a particular task, such as the development of a new product, and then disbanded and reassigned. The management of such projects requires a special type of organization to administer project resources in an effective manner and maintain clear accountability for the progress of the project. This organization also must avoid the inherent conflict of authority between project managers and managers in the marketing, production, and other departments and coordinate members of R and D teams who are assigned to more than one project and must divide their time among conflicting demands. The management of the whole process is a key to R and D and commercial success.

      In industries where continuous innovation and R and D are critical, such as electronics, drugs, robotics, and aerospace, the R and D department usually operates on a corporate level comparable to production, finance, and marketing. A relatively small management group usually sets priorities and budgets and supervises R and D activities. Most research and development personnel are assigned to project activity and report to individual project managers who have considerable autonomy and authority over the people and resources required to complete the project.

      The basic purpose of the R and D laboratories of private industry is to provide new products for manufacture and new or improved processes for producing them. One difficulty facing those who plan these projects is the relationship between development costs and predicted sales. In the early stages of development, project expenditures are typically low. They increase to a maximum and decline slowly, disappearing as early production difficulties are overcome and the product settles into a market niche.

      Similarly, production rises slowly at first, then more rapidly, and finally reaches a plateau. After a time, production starts to fall, sales declining gradually as the product becomes obsolete or abruptly as it is replaced by a new one.

      At any particular time, a company may have a number of products at different stages of the cycle. Project managers must ensure that the total development effort required is neither greater nor significantly less than available human and financial resources. Production managers must be satisfied that the eventual demands upon their capacity and resources will be sufficient to keep them fully loaded but not overloaded.

      To maintain such a balanced condition, a steady flow of new R and D proposals is required. Each must be studied by technical, commercial, financial, and manufacturing experts. Planning within an R and D organization, then, consists of selecting for development new products and processes that promise to employ the resources available in the most profitable manner. R and D managers have a key part to play in proposing projects as well as in carrying them out.

      At each stage of the research and development process, there are numerous technical, financial, and managerial issues that have to be resolved and coordinated with many groups. For example, during the late 1970s and early 1980s several computer and electronics companies in the United States and Europe established major research programs aimed at developing bubble memory devices for large computers. As bubble memories were proved to be technically feasible (i.e., work reliably under normal operating conditions), attention shifted to developing processes to manufacture the memory units at competitive costs. This part of the job proved the most difficult, and by the mid-1980s bubble memories had captured only a minuscule share of the total market for memory devices.

      The difficulties in developing the design and production specifications needed to produce low-cost bubble memory units severely tested the mettle of the R and D organizations in several companies in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Each company had to balance the expense of continued R and D investment against the consequences of withdrawing from bubble memory research. Making a decision like this requires a keen sense of the market, a knowledge of the technical issues at hand, and, most importantly, an understanding of the company's priorities and alternatives for R and D funds.

Project management and planning techniques

Value engineering and cost-benefit analysis (cost–benefit analysis)

      In the areas in which technology advances fastest, new products and new materials are required in a constant flow, but there are many industries in which the rate of change is gentle. Although ships, automobiles, telephones, and television receivers have changed over the last quarter of a century, the changes have not been spectacular. Nevertheless, a manufacturer who used methods even 10 years old could not survive in these businesses. The task of R and D laboratories working in these areas is to keep every facet of the production process under review and to maintain a steady stream of improvements. Although each in itself may be trivial, the total effect is many times as large as the margin between success and failure in a competitive situation.

      These efforts to improve existing products and processes have been formalized under the titles of value engineering and cost-benefit analysis.

      In value engineering every complete product and every component have their primary function described by an action verb and a noun. For example, an automobile's dynamo, or generator, generates electricity. The engineer considers all other possible methods of generation, calculates a cost for each, and compares the lowest figure with that for the existing dynamo. If the ratio is reasonably close to unity, the dynamo can be accepted as an efficient component. If not, the engineer examines the alternatives in more detail. The same treatment is applied in turn to each of the parts out of which the chosen component is built, until it is clear that the best possible value is being obtained.

      Cost-benefit analysis approaches the same fundamental problem from a different angle. It takes each part of a product or process and completely defines its function and the basis for measuring its benefits or effectiveness. Then the costs of obtaining each part are reviewed, taking full account of purchased material, labour, investment cost, downtime, and other factors. This focuses attention upon the most expensive items and makes it possible to apply the principal effort in seeking economies at the points of maximum reward. In the effort to improve a product or process, care must be taken to evaluate alternatives on the same “cost” and “benefit” bases so that existing approaches do not enjoy a special advantage just because they are familiar.

      These two processes are unending. Every new material, new manufacturing technique, or new way of carrying out an operation gives the engineer a chance to improve his product, and it is from these continuing improvements that the high degree of economy and reliability of modern equipment derives.

Thomas S. McLeod William K. Holstein

PERT and CPM

      Project managers frequently face the task of controlling projects that contain unknown and unpredictable factors. When the projects are not complex, bar charts can be used to plan and control project activities. These charts divide the project into discrete activities or tasks and analyze each task individually to indicate weekly manpower requirements. As the work goes forward, progress is charted and estimates are made on the effects of any delays or difficulties encountered during the completion of the project.

      In the mid-1950s more sophisticated methods of project planning and control were developed. Two systems based on a network portrayal of the activities that make up the project emerged at about the same time. PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) was first used in the development of submarines capable of firing Polaris missiles. CPM (the Critical Path Method (critical path analysis)) was used to manage the annual maintenance work in an oil and chemical refinery. Many variations and extensions of the two original techniques are now in use, and they have proved particularly valuable for projects requiring the coordinated work of hundreds of separate contractors. The use of project planning and control techniques based on PERT or CPM are now common in all types of civil engineering and construction work, as well as for large developmental projects such as the manufacture of aircraft, missiles, space vehicles, and large mainframe computer systems.

 A simple example of a network, or “arrow diagram,” used in developing an electronic component for a complex system, is shown in thefigure—>. Each circle on the diagram represents a task or well-defined activity that is part of the project. The number in each circle represents the expected time required to complete the task.

      Task A requires two weeks to complete and might, for example, represent the development of general specifications for an electronic unit in question. Tasks B and E might represent two related parts of the design of the unit's power supply, C and F the design of the main functional circuits, and D and G the design of the control circuitry. Arrows indicate the precedence of relationships and depict which tasks must be completed before subsequent tasks can begin. In this example, tasks B, C, and D cannot be started until A has been completed (that is, no one can design specific component items before the general specifications are agreed upon).

      Task H requires two weeks to complete but cannot be started until the designs of the power supply and the functional and control circuits have been completed. This task might represent the design of the unit's case or cover, and the case cannot be made final until all of the component designs are completed.

      The arrow diagram is an invaluable planning aid for determining how long a project will take to complete. Adding all of the task times together in the example indicates that there are 24 weeks of work to be completed. Note, however, that several tasks can be done simultaneously. For example, once task A has been completed, B, C, and D can be started and worked on concurrently. Thus, the earliest completion date can be determined by looking at all possible “paths” through the network and choosing the longest one, or the one with tasks requiring the most total time. In this example the longest, or “critical,” path is A–C–F–H, requiring a total time of 11 weeks.

      The arrow diagram yields additional information to the project planner. The earliest possible time that task H can be started is nine weeks after the start of the project (that is, after tasks A, C, and F have been completed). When task A is completed at the end of week 2, tasks B and E do not have to be started immediately in order to complete the project in the minimum possible time; B and E each have three weeks of “slack.” The diagram shows that if activity B is started three weeks later than its earliest possible start time (at week 5), it would be completed at the end of week 5; E would then start at the beginning of week 6 and be completed in time for H to begin at its earliest time, the beginning of week 10.

      The notion of slack in a project network is a powerful concept that allows planners to schedule scarce resources efficiently and manage people and equipment so that critical activities are kept on schedule and slack activities are delayed without placing the project in jeopardy.

      This simple example is based on CPM logic; it uses single-point task time estimates and assumes that the completion time for the project is the simple sum of the task times along the critical path. PERT logic assumes probabilistic estimates for each task time, with pessimistic, realistic, and optimistic estimates for the completion times of each task.

      In actual projects the relationships among the required tasks are often complex, and the arrow diagram for the project might cover the entire wall of an office. Even though it is a time-consuming job to work out arrow diagrams, precedence relationships, task time estimates, and so on for large projects, CPM or PERT is an invaluable aid to planning and control. The proliferation of computer programs that handle critical path and slack time calculations and the development of computer systems capable of handling cost estimates, budget control, resource allocation, and time scheduling promise to make CPM and PERT even more valuable than in the past.

William K. Holstein

Additional Reading

History

Kendall Birr, Pioneering in Industrial Research: The Story of the General Electric Research Laboratory (1957); W. Rupert Maclaurin and R. Joyce Harman, Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry (1949), a detailed account of the technical problems solved in one area; Harry W. Melville, The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (1962), a history of a government research department; and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, International Statistical Year for Research and Development: A Study of Resources Devoted to R and D in OECD Member Countries in 1963/64 (1967–68).

General

David Allison (ed.), The R and D Game: Technical Men, Technical Managers, and Research Productivity (1969), essays by 15 authors covering the whole field from creativity to administration, with an extensive bibliography; E. Duer Reeves, Management of Industrial Research (1967), a discussion of the integration of R and D into corporate structure; T.S. McLeod, Management of Research, Development, and Design in Industry (1969), basic problems of technical management; Carl Heyel (ed.), Handbook of Industrial Research Management, 2nd ed. (1968), essays by American managers on R and D problems as seen from the boardroom; Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times (1966, reprinted 1984), an account of resistance encountered by new inventions; and Devendra Sahal, Patterns of Technological Innovation (1981), a book of case studies on a variety of topics.

Organization

Alexander O. Stanley and K.K. White, Organizing the R&D Function (1965), descriptions of the organizational structures of leading U.S. companies; I.D.L. Ball (ed.), Industrial Research in Britain, 6th ed. (1968), details and statistics of U.K. industry; John Cockcroft (ed.), The Organization of Research Establishments (1965), essays by directors of 15 leading U.K. and U.S. laboratories; G. Stuart Monteith, R and D Administration (1969), a detailed description of administrative procedures in the United Kingdom and United States, with an extensive bibliography; and Allan Cox, The Cox Report on the American Corporation (1982).

Government

Report of the Committee on the Management and Control of Research and Development (HMSO 1961); and National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Science and Public Policy, Basic Research and National Goals: A Report to the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives (1965).

Project management

A popular treatment is Joseph J. Moder, Cecil R. Phillips, and Edward W. Davis, Project Management with CPM, PERT, and Precedence Diagramming, 3rd ed. (1983); a more complete work is J. Wiest and F. Levy, A Management Guide to PERT/CPM: With GERT/PDM/DCPM and Other Networks, 2nd ed. (1977). An interesting, practical approach is presented in John Mulvaney, Analysis Bar Charting: A Simplified Critical Path Analysis Technique (1969, reissued 1977).

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