How Good Is Our Research

In June, 1990 the Wall Street Journal presented a very flattering -- and accurate -- picture of the efforts of the GE RD externally, an increased emphasis on effectively marketing R&D to the company's businesses. That means both marketing the capabilities of researchers to produce unique, strategically important forefront technology to meet challenges and problems the businesses already know about, and also marketing the results of our own explorations beyond the current scope of those businesses' technical efforts. For an impressionistic survey of this emphasis and its success I direct you to the article. But a more critical audience of R&D professionals deserves a more searching look at a particular aspect of this new emphasis that impressionistic accounts tend to overlook: namely, how do we know it is working? In particular, how can an R&D Center, while becoming more exploratory and better at marketing its skills and its results, meet critical scrutiny from the company's top management? As R&D gets viewed more critically from the corporate office, the need grows to give straight answers to the question: "How do we know our research is as productive as it should be?" In today's era of intense global competition, we can't rely on history or sentiment. We are living at a time when sudden changes breed short memories. One day the corporate lab is praised as the "lab that never lets you down." The next day it's damned as the lab that hasn't had a really good new idea in 30 years. In this era, we lab directors aren't going to get away with qualitative assertions about productivity. I recall a conversation I had with one of my contemporaries, the director of a corporate lab. He told me, "My predecessor used to say that the best measurement of R&D is inversely proportional to the number of times that you re asked to measure R&D." Then that contemporary of mine paused for a moment and said, "Come to think about it, maybe that's how the guy who said that became my predecessor." One sure way to become a predecessor is to blithely tell your CEO that good research is too mystical to be measured. It's one thing to recognize that all measurements of research are imperfect. But it's quite another thing to say that because they are imperfect, we shouldn't measure at all. It's also important to recognize that the measurement process shouldn't become so intense that it wastes the time of the researchers and leads to second-guessing and acrimony among the management. We need measures that indicate productivity without themselves having a negative effect on productivity. With that in mind, I describe here four ways of measuring the impact of our renewed approach to R&D. Each of them is incomplete in itself. But each adds an important dimension to the total picture. I'll start with the roughest and most impressionistic, and work my way to more quantifiable, definite measures. The 'Jimmy Stewart Test' The first is what I call the "Jimmy Stewart test," after the actor. One of his most famous roles was in a movie called "It's a Wonderful Life." In it, he plays a man who runs a small-town savings and loan. A sudden setback has left him discouraged and considering suicide. At that point, his guardian angel comes down from heaven and figures out a way to cheer him up and save his life. The guardian angel shows Jimmy Stewart how much worse the world would have been if he hadn't lived. In much the same way, we can ask ourselves a similar question. What would our companies look like today if a central research laboratory had not existed? …