Patent Document ID: 20040230397
Application ID: 10438252
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method of improving the effectiveness of a research and development (R&D) process within an organization comprising one or more sites, therapy areas and projects, the process comprising a plurality of stages of selection and/or enumeration of research options, wherein each stage comprises work comprising one or more sets of parallel tasks which are optionally reiterated in a number of cycles, wherein each task comprises one or more subtasks, wherein a batch is a collection of the one or more subtasks, wherein each set of parallel tasks has an input flow and an output flow of research options, wherein, at a final stage, the research options are candidates, the method comprising the steps of: a. identifying quality attributes of the candidates; b. defining a measure of utility over a quality profile of identified quality attributes, wherein a combination of utility and the flow of candidates quantifies improvements to the R&D process; c. identifying the types of research options for each of the plurality of stages; d. identifying criteria relevant for use in selecting and/or enumerating amongst research options of each identified type; e. identifying causal relationships amongst the criteria and between the criteria and the quality attributes; f. forming a probabilistic network representing the causal relationships as links holding conditional probabilities and representing the criteria and quality attributes as nodes, each node having a plurality of states permitting an ordering amongst the research options consistent with thresholds applicable for selecting and/or enumerating the research options, and each node holding a probability distribution over the plurality of states; g. estimating an effective capacity for each stage; h. setting local probabilities at nodes that represent prior knowledge of the research options and the R&D process; i. identifying alternatives for operating the R&D process; j. intervening in the probabilistic network to change the probabilities of the states to represent differences between the alternatives wherein the differences comprise at least one of (i) the criteria to be applied, (ii) the stage in which a criterion is applied, and (iii) the threshold at which a criterion is applied; and k. evaluating the degree of improvement by calculating (i) the quality profile of the candidates, (ii) the change in an average value of the utility for each candidate, and (iii) the output flow of the candidates, limited by the input flow of research options relative to the effective capacity at each stage.