III. RECOMMENDATIONS

C. Findings

A number of the respondents made general and/or specific comments on the projects. One common thread was that the projects presented for rating were all or mainly on target in terms of being the most important ones for R&D to meet the industry's needs. No matter what a respondent may have thought about the overall list of projects, every respondent had at least some projects that he or she rated highly.

Perhaps one of the most revealing findings from these ratings is that on many projects established, recognizably knowledgeable people gave diametrically opposite ratings on specific projects. Not only that, they emphasized how strongly they felt by writing on the rating form comments such as "absolutely critical" in support of and "stupid" in opposition to doing R&D on that topic. More moderate comments in these modes were "great" and "good" or "lots of research has already been done on this." Again, such comments were made on the same projects or project areas.

The diversity of the opinions expressed in these ratings seems, in effect, to validate these findings. While this diversity of opinion may be healthy for the industry, it indicates how difficult yet important it is to get a good cross-section of input as this rating process did. Otherwise, any particular subset of this group that might be gathered in a meeting to determine R&D priorities could, with the best intentions in the world and with dedicated effort, come up with a wholly different set of recommendations than would a different subset of this group. In addition, if specific individuals were more likely to talk or be deferred to in such meetings and their preferences recorded as the priorities of the group, this diversity would not be captured.

Yet, for all the diversity in the extremes of the feelings and ratings of particular R&D areas and projects by different individuals, the rating process was able to produce clear prioritizations among the projects.

This may in part also be due to the fact that the rating process forced the respondents to consider the full range of criteria that had been suggested--as represented in the three surrogate criteria. This meant that no single criterion carried the day as far as overall priority for the projects is concerned. Rather R&D areas and projects had to have been rated high on all three criteria by many respondents to obtain an overall score high enough to put them in the top rank of projects.

There were some comments related to the role of the private sector--i.e., the suppliers--in doing the R&D being considered here. Others related to the role suppliers could play in providing input on what R&D has been done in certain R&D areas and what is already commercially available. These are good topics for future discussion.

The easiest way to see what recommendations make sense from these findings is to look at the highest scored R&D areas and projects from the ratings. There are 18 projects that received scores over 170. This is approximately one-quarter of the total of 74 projects, which many respondents considered the most important R&D topics to begin with. The top projects with their scores are the following.