Hierarchy Decision Model for Managing Innovative R&D Product Development Projects

Technological innovation is critical to any organization’s ability to survive and grow in today’s business environment. It is widely accepted that companies’ ability to effectively manage its Research and Development (R&D) investments and portfolio in order to deliver value through technological innovation is a key determinant of its market success and competitive advantage [13]. With globalization, Companies’ have a broader access to information and markets which have resulted in amplifying the need for technological innovation in order to succeed over the long term [11]. Although companies have access to and use tools to measure quantitative aspect of the business especially on the input side of innovation, it has been proven much more challenge to measure the qualitative aspect of innovation. Technology managers and leaders need methodological assessment tools in order to decide among the active technologically innovative projects in their organization. This paper focuses on technologically innovative projects where R&D managers are not able to directly leverage knowledge from past project successes and failures. The objective of this project is to develop a decision model based on Mission, Objectives, Goals and Activities (MOGSA) model developed by Dr. Kocaoglu and his team [18] in order to enable the management to relatively rank various projects in their R&D Portfolio. Using the relative rank from the decision model, R&D managers are able to determine appropriate funding allocation; in some cases resulting in termination of one or more projects with lower future potential in order to provide additional funding for more promising projects