MANAGING RESEARCH-AND-DEVELOPMENT FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

OVERVIEW: A benchmarking study of 79 highly-regarded RED organizations has revealed ten practices for making excellent R&D decisions and ten additional practices most likely to confer competitive advantage on t hose organizations that learn to master them. Although these leading o rganizations acknowledge such ''best practices'' as ''learn from post- project audits'' and ''anticipate competition'' to be very important, only a few companies within this select group have been able to master them. The best practices database is thus proving to be a useful reso urce for companies that wish to diagnose their R&D strategic excellenc e and then to take the appropriate improvement steps.