This is a useful start. Among quantitative measures, several stand out as unusually helpful. When this measure is carefully applied, paying close attention to the product life cycle and its implications for the definition of what is a new product, one can learn a lot from the results. The measure appears to be increasing industry-wide over time. Even so, our 1995 Product Development Benchmarking Study showed that more than three-quarters of companies had return from new products running at a rate lower than the investment.
Companies use RDEI to track improvements over time because it is such a good directional measure.
Development cycle time is an indispensable measure. In the chemical industry, being first to market is not as important as in other industries with very short product life cycles, but having the development process under control is every bit as important. There is no better measure of a development process under control than the ability to predict development cycle time accurately, and there is no better way to increase effective development capacity than by reducing the time it takes to develop products and processes. The measure of strategic balance is a newly emerging one. It addresses the balance of effort of the entire development portfolio, not simply individual project performance metrics.