یک چارچوب مدیریت ریسک عملکرد گرا برای پروژه های ابتکاری "تحقیق و توسعه"

Uncertainty is one of the major inherent difficulties in developing innovative products, due to their highly dynamic markets and technologies. The presence of a large degree of uncertainty leads to high R&D risks, resulting in many R&D failures. Therefore, it is important to manage R&D risks through all R&D stages to improve R&D project success rates. This paper proposes a new risk management framework that aligns project risk management with corporate strategy and a performance measurement system to increase success rates of R&D projects and to accomplish corporate strategic goals. The balanced scorecard is used to identify major performance measures of an R&D organization based on the firm vision and strategy. Quality function deployment is adapted to transform organizational performance measures into project performance measures and a systematic procedure is developed for risk identification, assessment, response planning, and control. The proposed risk management framework enables an R&D project to be focused on achieving the corporate goals and provides a more effective way to identify, assess, analyze, and monitor R&D risks along the project cycle. The proposed methodology is illustrated with a drug development project.

In the increasingly competitive and globalized marketplace, technological innovation is one of the important key strategies for high technology firms to survive and achieve corporate growth (Teece, 1986 and Freeman and Soete, 1997). However, various types of innovation (Dewar and Dutton, 1986 and Henderson and Clark, 1990) involve different degrees of uncertainty in technologies and markets that may cause failures of R&D projects (Doctor et al., 2001, Raz et al., 2002 and Lee et al., 2010). For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, the success rate of a drug development project from the first study in humans to launch is less than 10% (CMR, 2006). Therefore, it is important to manage risks for innovative R&D projects through all the development stages to improve their success rates (Smith and Merritt, 2002, Keizer et al., 2002, Bush et al., 2005 and Pisano, 2006).

The example reported in Section 4 demonstrates that the proposed risk management framework provides a systematic approach to align the project risk management with corporate strategy and a performance measurement system to actively identify and manage critical R&D risks throughout the entire project. Although, due to limited space, the example only demonstrates the preclinical testing phase from the internal process perspective, the proposed approach can be extended to other development stages and perspectives as well.