About this issue

THE PAPERS in this issue represent the first fruits of a multiyear effort by members of the Engineering Management Society (EMS) of the IEEE, led by Bill Dean, chairman of EMS, to provide the readers of this TRANSACTIONS with special issues on “hot topics” on the Management of Research, Development, Engineering, and Innovation. We have had a number of such special issues and special sections in the past 25 years on topics such as: Project Management, Operations Research in R, D&E Management, Personnel, Project Selection, Research-on-Research, the Innovation Process (the May, 1983, issue). Many of these special sections and issues resulted from a fortuitous grouping of papers around a particular topic, allowing some papers to “jump the queue” so that a coherent set could be presented at one time. This set comes from a unique effort, based on another major activity of the EMSthe annual Engineering Management Conferences (EMCY). Of the first five such conferences which EMS of the IEEE undertook on its own (similar conferences used to be sponsored by a combination of several professional engineering societies), four were based on invited and contributed papers across the whole range of R&D/Engineering Management topics. (Please excuse the inconsistency of terminology; usage varies widely in this developing field, from “Research-on-Research and R&D/Innovation,” to “R&D/Etogineering and Engineering Management” and we are continually wrestling with t h e structure and boundaries of the field.) TTie papers in this issue, however, were generated by the EMC held in June, 1982, which was designed around one specific topic in the overall field-the Evaluation of R&D/Innovation. It was, primarily, an invited paper conference, with almost all attendees presenting papers and/or discussing the papers presented. The eight papers in this issue represent the first batch of the more - han 24 papers presented at the conference, which have completed the reviewing/revision cycle. While all papers focus on aspects of the monitoring! review/assessment/evaluation process for R&D/Engineering projects and programs, their methodology, areas of application, and specific approaches vary widely. Some deal with industrial or government projects and programs, and others are general enough to apply to either. The techniques range from highly mathematical and quantitative to those which employ qualitative and intuitive methods.