Artigo recebido em 12/11/2015 e aprovado em 02/03/2016. Artigo avaliado em double blind review. Benefits and Risks Assessment for the Brazilian Electric Industry R&D ProjectsThe present research aims at proposing a methodological procedure to rank Research and Development (R&D) projects in the Brazilian electric industry in respect of two issues: their benefit and risk priority number (RPN). The former means the value added and the later means the related risk. The weights of both measures are achieved through a multicriteria technique called Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP). The performance of each project related to their benefits and risks are assessed by means of an ordinal scale of importance for benefits and the likelihood of occurrence versus the consequence impacts for risks. At the end, the projects are scattered in an orthogonal chart, making it possible to perform absolute and relative evaluation. Aiming at demonstrating and validating the proposed methodology, a case study was presented comprising the identification of six benefits and six risk events applied to five R&D projects is presented.