SPEEDY RESEARCH-AND-DEVELOPMENT - HOW BENEFICIAL

As companies increasingly try to do more with less, one of the key pre scriptions in the literature has been to employ practices that shorten time to market, including the time taken in R&D. This article reports on survey research that links cycle times and financial performance, and records executives reactions to the results. The main finding is t hat the reduced costs of faster cycles fail to show up in improved ear nings, and suggests several reasons why this occurs. For companies for ced by competition to speed up their cycles, several management method s are given for reducing time with minimal financial impairment.