About this issue

ALTHOUGH this has been a year for special issues (more are on the way), the normal flow of unsolicited papers which have completed the review and revision cycle yields the current set of miscellaneous papers. They range from fairly formal and quantitative papers related to project selection resource allocation (one of the TRANSACTIONS regular topic areas) and evaluation, to managing engineers. Two of the papers are by authors in industry and the rest are by academic authors. Three of the papers in this issue are concerned with measures of the effectiveness or output of the R&D/Innovation process, two are concerned with management methods, and two are concerned with teams and integration of efforts of different specialists. All of these are important themes for practicing managers of Research, Development, and Engineering (RD&E). However, it must be frustrating for a manager, faced with an acute problem of organizing or managing or faced with recurring “chronic” problems (decision-making, coordination, communication, leadership, evaluation, etc.) to find that the literature, including the papers in this TRANSACTIONS, does not have quick and obvious solutions to his problems.