Development of an assessment tool for industrial R&D

Industrial research and development (R&D) is an investment in the future, and one of the main priorities to generate innovations. To find out the strengths and weaknesses of an organization's R&D to be prepared for future challenges, this paper will introduce a tool which assesses the industrial R&D capabilities and goes beyond performance measurement. It is a holistic approach which discovers the actual as-is R&D status and gives individual recommendations and actions for improvements to companies, using maturity levels and considering five fields of R&D: strategy, organizational structure, processes, methods and tools as well as people. Pre-defined maturity levels constitute the optimal R&D profile. Industrial testing and validation cases ensure valid answers of the assessment tool with its procedure, structure and content.