R&D Portfolio Management: Performance Management

With the intensification of global competition for science and technology, R&D has emerged as the key factor in boosting national competitiveness. Many countries have been raising R&D investments for implementation of various national R&D programs and management of research institutes (Lee et al., 1996). One of the most important prerequisites for benefiting from national R&D is an effective and objective system of performance evaluation and management (Nakamura and Tsuji, 2004). Various frameworks and methods have been proposed to evaluate R&D performance, but they have mainly focused on evaluation of short-term R&D outputs despite the fact that there is a time-lag between R&D inputs and outputs (Graves and Langowitz, 1996). Long-term R&D outcomes have been neglected so that they have failed to be fully utilized and spread. Thus, it is imperative to mirror long-term R&D outcomes in performance evaluation and utilize them through continuous management and monitoring.