The third workshop on R&D quality and productivity was held at the Samuel Neaman Institute on June 17th, 1993 and is a direct continuation of the two previous workshops of the series, which were organized in the framework of a doctorate theses by Doron Meirsdorf under the guidance of Professor Ezey Dar-El, Dr. Ze’ev Bonen and Professor Paul Feigin in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion. Also taking part in organizing the workshop and analyzing its results were the students Doron samueli and Moshe Ben Ami in the framework of their final project towards the first degree in Industrial Engineering and Management.
The aim of the research is to build a system for measuring and evaluating R&D quality and productivity, which will be able to supply fast feedback during the design. Such a system will enable warnings in real time and taking the required rectifying actions. In this way an ongoing process of improving R&D quality and productivity will be achieved (Meirsdorf, 1993).
The four stages that have been defined for building this system are:
a. Identifying the influencing factors (“what to measure?”)
b. Finding suitable indices (“how to measure?”)
c. Building an integrative model for measuring and evaluation (“how to weigh?”)
d. Determining recommendations for rectifying steps (“what do the results mean?”)
