YARDSTICKS FOR INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH.

By James Brian Quinn. NewYork: Ronald Press, 1959. 224 pp. $6.50.

This book is a pioneer volume: "the first full-length treatment of the problems of evaluating industrial research output for management purposes."

Research, as even the layman readily realizes, is an enterprise of gigantic proportions in present-day society. Indeed, some eighty billions of dollars, Professor Quinn tells us, are expended annually in the United States alone for scientific research and development, in the interests of expanding and improving our technology and its products. Of this eleven-figure total, approximately forty per cent is underwritten by American industry, and it is on providing the means for analyzing and evaluating such industrial research effort that this volume focuses itself.

"In presenting in an organized fashion the major themes of current thought about research evaluation," writes the author in his preface, "the book describes the techniques now used by industry - particularly those of large and successful concerns of the chemical and electronics industries, which spend about one-fourth of non-government research money in their balanced programs to create technology primarily for their own commercial exploitation. From this extensive survey of current practices, the book sets up a theoretical which structure to define clearly the information 'best possible' research evaluation system would provide. The larger part of the book then develops a thorough, consist- ent, and practical evaluation system which comes the closest to furnishing the informa- tion specified in the 'ideal' system.

"The book recommends a segmental approach, describing a series of techniques and criteria (a selected composite of suggested new methods and those now in use) for assessing all facets of the research program. Technical evaluation, with its entirely different criteria, is distinguished from economic evaluation. The latter, in turn, is segmented into appraisals of fundamental research, of fensive research which develops technology for exploiting new markets, and defensive research for improving a company's competitive position in existing markets."

If this statement serves to define the scope and intent of the work, it does not give any adequate indication of the admirable orderliness of the textual arrangement and expo- sition. Clear, thoughtfully conceived, and carefully executed diagrams and tables are also liberally provided and used to great effect in supplementing the text.

Yardsticks for Industrial Research will, as a trail-blazing study, be of wide interest not only to those in any way interested in research within business organizations, but surely to those concerned with divers other research fields as well.