Why the Low Success Rate of Research Dedicated To New Technologies? Tolstoy May Have Had the Answer

Abstract

The view of American industrial research from the perspective of the general public, the practicing scientist as professor or teacher or university researcher is very fuzzy. But in general it may be perceived as quite successful. Quite the contrary, as the recent wholesale cuts in industrial research have shown, the track record of communicating discoveries into technologies, the cost efficiency is dismal. The problem is that the cost efficiency of research based on the average cost per project tells nothing about the enormous differences in the success rate that exist among various laboratories. Based on the experiences of one laboratory, some general observations are made about the multiplicity of factors that can cause a development effort to fail and suggestions are made how the research efficiency could be improved.