How productive is your R&D organization?

By Ron Collett
edadesignline.com (July 01, 2010)

In early June, the U.S. Labor Department lowered its estimation of first-quarter productivity-growth to 2.8 percent on an annualized basis. The revision came in large part because companies are still cautious about hiring new workers and are adding more hours to their existing labor forces instead. There is always some debate over the accuracy of government labor statistics when so much of the economy is driven by services rather than the output of easily measurable items like steel or cars. And that raises fundamental questions in our industry, as executives strive to improve engineering productivity: