Digital Brightens Black Box of R&D

In McKinsey:  Very true, but how do you apply the analytics to understand what you are seeing?

Brightening the black box of R&D
An all-in-one, one-for-all formula to determine R&D’s productivity can help companies see how well the function is performing. April 2015   byEric Hannon, Sander Smits, and Florian Weig

The question of R&D’s productivity has long resembled a Gordian knot. Look nearly anyplace else in today’s corporations, and there’s far less difficulty measuring productivity and performance. In manufacturing and logistics, you can get a sense of things just by looking around the production floor, the inventory room, or the loading dock. Even the performance of the advertising budget—once famously opaque—is now, thanks to digital technology, much easier to see.  ... "