WHY THE LOW SUCCESS RATE OF RESEARCH DEDICATED TO NEW TECHNOLOGIES - TOLSTOI MAY HAVE HAD THE ANSWER

The view of American industrial research from the perspective of the g eneral public, the practicing scientist as professor or teacher or uni versity researcher is very fuzzy. But in general it may be perceived a s quite successful. Quite the contrary, as the recent wholesale cuts i n industrial research have shown, the track record of communicating di scoveries into technologies, the cost efficiency is dismal. The proble m is that the cost efficiency of research based on the average cost pe r project tells nothing about the enormous differences in the success rate that exist among various laboratories. Based on the experiences o f one laboratory, some general observations are made about the multipl icity of factors that can cause a development effort to fail and sugge stions are made how the research efficiency could be improved.