Transforming R&D expenditures into innovation : identifying and evaluating effective metrics to track the effectiveness of R&D in software innovation

Abstract

"How much of HP's R&D-spend delivers innovation?" Russ Daniels, HP's CTO for Software pointed out to me that this is a central question for HP and that the measurement of the transformation of R&D efforts into software innovation would be a topic worthwhile to investigate. The approaches which are currently applied within HP to measure the "innovativeness" of software R&D are not sufficient. An exploration is needed to identify more sophisticated metrics or methods to measure the use of R&D in software innovation. This is the key goal of this thesis. An answer to this important question is of direct relevance and interest for the CEO of HP.