Business Research Sources -ch 10: Research-Technology Management

10. MIT´s Technology Review

Recommended Supplement: Research-Technology Management

The publisher of this publication, Industrial Research, Inc., is a nonprofit organization whose members are approximately 300 industrial companies with technical research departments. These member companies are responsible for the conduct and management of a large portion of all industrial research and development activity being carried on in the United States.

This publication, formerly called Research Management, has a very readable format and definitely qualifies as excellent reference material. It has an impressive board of editors who help to maintain the quality of the material (e.g. vice president of corporate R&D, The Gillette Company; director, product engineering, Snap-on-Tools; director of research, Olin Corporation; etc.). Two examples of feature articles are "Strategic Alliances in the Global Market Place," by Bruce Merrifield (describes the exponential growth of international alliances and predicts it will progressively undermine nationalistic economic and security policies) and "Critical Success Factors in R&D Projects," by Jeffrey Pinto and Dennis Slevin (authors found that the relative importance of 10 factors critical to and predictive of success varies with the particular stage in a project's life cycle).

The departments include Profiles (e.g., "Managers at Work"), Perspectives (e.g.. "MIT dean wants radical redesign of engineering education"), and Information Resources (e.g., "The Business of Science, Mastering Technology," etc.).

Contents of Research-Technology Management are indexed and abstracted in the ABI/INFORM database. A case could be made by some business school pundits that American business education is too dedicated to the marketing and finance areas. The Industrial Research Institute can be a helpful resource for trying to balance this bias by helping to develop areas of educational interest for students.

The purposes of the Industrial Research Institute are listed as follows:

to promote, through the cooperative efforts of its members, improved, economical, and effective techniques of organization, administration, and operations of industrial research;
to foster interaction between research and other corporate functions;
to generate understanding and cooperation between the academic and industrial research communities;
to afford a means for industry to cooperate effectively with government in matters related to research;
to stimulate and develop an understanding of research as a force in economic, industrial, and social activities;
to encourage high standards in the field of industrial research.

Something to Do

Here are some other valuable sources of reference service you may wish to consider contacting for either research or job (internships, fellowships, etc.) opportunities:

American Institute for Economic Research, (413) 528-1216.
Brookings Institution, (202) 797-6000.
Research and Development (monthly), Cahners Publishing Co., Inc., (212) 645-0067.
Review of Business and Economic Research (semiannual), University of New Orleans, (504) 283-6248.
Competitor Intelligence: How to Get It-How to Use It, by Leonard Fuld, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., (800) 526-5368; reveals how to gather business and industrial information and includes sources and critical annotations.
How To Find Information About Companies (annual), Washington Researchers, (202) 333-3533.
AUBER Bibliography, Association for University and Business Economic Research, (304) 293-5837.