About this issue

Schmied´s paper tackles, head on, one of the most pressing problems for government sponsored Research, Development, and Engineering (R, D, & E) — the question of payoff. As costs have risen and the total national R, D, & E budgets of the industrialized countries have escalated, policy makers and the general public are increasingly demanding to know how much this “investment” is worth compared to other possible uses of public funds. This Transactions has carried various papers, throughout the past 2–3 decades, on methods of measuring payoff from R & D and related activities. Most of them, however, have fallen short of tracing longer run financial consequences of particular projects and contracts. Schmied describes an approach to this that yields quantitative data on the second and third order payoffs from contracts let by an international high-energy physics research center — CERN — as reported by the contractors themselves. He is currently applying this methodology in other areas of technology and his work promises to provide a useful measurement and evaluation tool in this important area. Blandin and Brown report on a study that adds to our knowledge of the way in which managers perceive and interact with their information environment. This is a subject of continuing concern to readers of this Transactions, since information represents both the vital inputs and outputs of the R, D, & E process. They address the human and organizational aspects of this vast subject. Kochhar, on the other hand, addresses some of the mechanical aspects of the process, relating information flows in both engineering and manufacturing to current state-of-application of computer systems designed to make the process more effective.