Evaluation of Company R&D Performance: A Two-stage DEA Approach

A large number of methodologies for the evaluation of company Research and Development (R&D) performance have been developed and reported in the literature over the last few years. Nearly all literature only focused on the evaluation methods based on a project level instead of a company level. In order to develop a better tool for the assessment of R&D performance at the company level, we present a new two-stage approach on the basis of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). At last, we make an empirical analysis of fifteen high-tech companies. The results indicate that the second stage (or combined) model provides a good ranking tool for company R&D performance and strongly discriminates the subsets included in the R&D activities clearly in need of improvement.