TVP – Metric 32 Preservation of Technology Output

Background | User Guide | Program Contents | Stakeholders | List of Metrics

1. Metric Definition

A count of R&D-created technical documents, including technical reports, patents, and publications.
The product of research is information. In the latter part of the innovation cycle, preservation of the knowledge gained is relatively easy, since it is embodied in the production drawings, manuals, and source code related to the products and processes of a business. Earlier in the cycle, in the research process, however, the preservation of information is sometimes less orderly and institutionalized. The purpose of this metric is to ensure the documentation of information gained in the research portion of the innovation process. This can result in significant improvements in the efficiency of the organization as costly rework is eliminated or dramatically reduced.

This metric is usually defined by simply counting the number of technical documents, including technical reports, patents, and publications.  This metric is significantly improved and enabled by having a robust knowledge management system in place.

2. Advantages and Limitations

The advantage to using a preservation metric, and associated information process, is that important information is preserved and therefore increases the efficiency of the organization by reducing rework as a result of loss of organizational knowledge. This is normally accomplished via a documentation requirement associated with each research project. It is especially important to establish a reporting process using the metric to enforce process discipline in the long-term research area, since often knowledge gained in such efforts does not have an immediately apparent use. Documenting and preserving the knowledge can be extremely important so that retrieval at a later date, in an entirely different context, is guaranteed.

The major potential limitation or disadvantage is that the value of measuring the number and/or quality of research reports for research organizations has not correlated well with financial success or value creation of the R&D organization, or its associated businesses. As utilized in many R&D organizations, the practice of counting research reports, publications, and conference papers has had debatable value to industry.  The metric can also suffer due to the difficulty in measuring quality of research documentation and therefore relies on counting the reports.

3. How to Use the Metric

Preservation of technical output is a report metric. In many companies, it simply consists of counting the number of research reports per organization, per project, or by technical competency area. This metric can also be expressed as the percentage of key outcomes of projects that are captured in reports. A related metric is to require a certain number of reports for each research project, either timed (by quarter, semiannually, or annually) or related to certain specific project milestones which are especially significant. Some organizations feel that a more important metric is report requests. In this view, corporate research is for the benefit of internal customers. Since report requests indicate interest on the part of the business units, requests for reports show the level of interest in each technology by the businesses which represent the R&D customer base.

Reporting metrics do not correlate well with successful innovation. Since the preservation of technical information is important, possibly the simplest approach is to require that each project document results.  The metric is simply a check-mark that the documentation is accomplished in an acceptable form.

4. Options and Variations

To reduce the reporting overhead, a simplification is to allow any major publication or conference report which covers the reporting requirement to also satisfy the reporting metric. The report request metric can be dealt with more easily if reports are distributed in electronic form, or at least with electronic abstracts, and requests are limited to electronic requests, which can be easily tabulated.

5. Champions and Contacts

6. References