A Methodology for Collective Evaluation and Selection of Industrial R&D Projects

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology for evaluating and selecting R&D projects in a collective decision setting, especially useful at sectorial and national levels. It consists of two major phases: Evaluation and Selection. The evaluation process repeatedly uses mathematical programming models to determine the "relative values" of a given R&D project from the viewpoint of the other R&D projects. The selection process of R&D projects is based on these "relative values" and is done through a model-based outranking method. The salient features of the methodology developed are its ability to (1) permit the evaluation of an R&D project from the viewpoint of the other R&D projects without at first imposing a uniform evaluation scheme, and (2) maximize the level of consensus as to which projects should not be retained in the R&D Program being funded, thus minimizing the level of possible resentment in those organizations or departments whose projects are not included in the R&D Program. Also discussed in this paper is an application of the methodology to evaluate and select major R&D projects in the iron and steel industry of Turkey.R&D project evaluation and selection, group decision making, iron and steel industry, data envelopment analysis, social choice, multiple criteria analysis, consensus formation

Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis

“…A simple and popular way to model this shared resource consumption is to divide value scores by money for a "bang for the buck" index [36] [43]. A variant on this idea is to use some sort of e¢ciency analysis approach such as DEA [72][73] [74], but careless use of DEA methods can be misleading for the reasons laid out in [75]. An alternative way to deal with shared resource consumption is to take the outputs from a MAUT or AHP model, and use these as coe¢cients in an optimisation model e.g [12][65], in which the shared resource limit is modelled as a constraint.…”

The role of standardization at the interface of product and process development in biotechnology

“…In a multi-project environment, an earlier involvement of process development potentially increases the number of running development projects. Therefore, integrated process development cannot be properly investigated without accounting for aspects of the R&D project selection process (Oral et al 1991).…”

Multicriteria Portfolio Decision Analysis for Project Selection

“…Of particular interest in this area is the work by [70] which uses both MAUT and AHP, and seeks to compare both approaches; also [71] describes an application of a technique called the Judgmental Analysis System (JAS), but like the AHP uses pairwise comparison data, but …nds scores using geometric least squares rather than eigenvalue decomposition. Outranking approaches have been less prominently applied in this domain, but examples of applications using outranking principles do exist [51] [72], and it should also be noted that R&D prioritisation is a prominent running example in the book of Roy [2] which is the central text on outranking methods.…”