Best Practices in Assessment of Research and Development Organizations (2012) / Chapter Skim
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4 Assessing Technical Quality
4 Assessing Technical Quality
Pages 29-37
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From page 29... ...
Of special significance for many R&D organizations is the presence in any particular division, laboratory, or project of people with deep and creative technical capabilities.2 It is important to assess the organization's policies and actions aimed at steadily building on the sets of capabilities associated with individuals possessing both breadth of experience across multiple projects and depth in one or more systems and disciplines. An effective organization enables its staff to capture new skills required for a given set of tasks at hand, while over the long term building the network required to make team members effective participants in global efforts to achieve the overall goals of the organization.
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From page 30... ...
Thus, a key element of any meaningful assessment will be the agility with which an organization acts, at all stages of a program, to train its team and to provide a high level of exposure to diverse programs and organizations working with related or overlapping technical agendas and expertise. At the heart of looking forward to the next generation of scientific and technological opportunities are the organization's scientists and engineers.
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From page 31... ...
If the assessment is also intended for an audience that includes budgeting authorities, it is appropriate to assess the potential value of additional infrastructure funding. Technical facilities encompass the physical space of the organization and how it is occupied.
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From page 32... ...
Even if formal management and personnel policy do not reflect this matrix, technical programs crossing disciplinary organizational lines do. Such cross-organizational programs will also be reviewed in a comprehensive assessment..
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From page 33... ...
It is essential that candidates for membership on assessment panels be required to present any biases or potential conflicts of interest to the contractor so that the appointment decision can take such potential conflicts into consideration. In any case, external peer review is essential for evaluating any R&D organization.
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From page 34... ...
For example, for papers that discuss research near the boundaries of their discipline publication and citation in top journals may be more difficult to achieve. Also bibliometric databases may not adequately cover conference proceedings, which are increasingly important in some fields such as computer science.
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From page 35... ...
Science and technology can lead to a high quantity and quality of patents, which may correlate with an improved knowledge base, improved pool of skills, the protection of promising ideas, new products, and improved innovation activity. Data related to patents are easily quantifiable; patent databases are large and easily searched, and the data can be manipulated and readily cross-correlated.
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From page 36... ...
This set of metrics and criteria is not presented as a prescription, but, rather, as an example of a tailored set developed to meet the perceived assessment needs of one organization. The assessment items identified fell into the following categories: relevance to the wider scientific and technical community, impact to customers, formulation of the goals and plans for projects, methodology applied to the research and development activities, adequacy of supporting capabilities and resources, and responsiveness to the findings from previous assessments.
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From page 37... ...
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS Different aspects of the assessment of technical quality are suited to appropriate quantitative and qualitative metrics. The quality of the research activities is best viewed in the context of the entire portfolio of the organization, including suitable assessment of crossorganizational programs.
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