Balance Scorecard Integration: An Approach to Measure Overall R&D Performance

摘要

The evaluation of research and development (R&D) performance was always challenging. R&D is now a key topic for the company's innovation strategy, which required an integrated system of measurement that evaluates both financial and non-financial returns. However, to our knowledge an integrated system that can effectively measure R&D performance does not exist. Some authors suggested that the balanced scorecard (BSC) might be a useful instrument for the measurement of R&D. Literature review indicated only one study from Bigliardi and Dormio (2010) attempted to implement BSC to evaluate R&D performance.;The aim of this paper was to develop a BSC to evaluate R&D performance based on inputs from participants with minimum five years of R&D experience, and then correlated the results to the results of Bigliardi and Dormio (2010) study. The goal was to advance the current stage of BSC for R&D performance evaluation. The methodology was a qualitative case-study based research using personal interviews and focused group interview to collect data for BSC model.;The result obtained from this case study was a BSC model with 35 performance indicators, which 22 indicators correlated to indicators from Bigliardi and Dormio (2010) study. Even with the evident of correlation existed, the results suggested that there might be more indicators needed for the BSC in this study, and some indicators from Bigliardi and Dormio might not be applicable to R&D. The limitation on this case study was the BSC model developed from a sample size, which required further study to quantify as well as generalize the results. The limitation on the Bigliardi and Dormio BSC model was performance indicators extracted from literature reviews. Therefore, some indicators might not be applicable to R&D. In addition, this BSC has too many indicators, which may be difficult to implement.;Recommendation for future research is a quantitative study that combines the resultsf from both studies to develop a more rigorous BSC for R&D. This model would be optimized for implementation as well as generalization. This study would include a wider sample of firms, operating in different industries, where R&D represents the core activity.