Benchmarking your R&D: Results from IRI/CIMS annual R&D survey for FY '98

Data from the IRI/CIMS Annual R&D Survey for fiscal year 1998 confirms continuation of the recent upward upward trend in both the New Sales Ratio and R&D intensity that Ir ns first reported last year. The increase in the New Sales Ratio and the increase in R&D intensity the last three I ears (1996-1998) reverses an earlier downward trend in these two metrics during the previous three years (1993-1995). These trends are only evident if one examines time-series data from a common set of companies. Although more than 75 IRI companies hale provided R&D expenditure and sales revenue data in any given year; the trends noted above are based on only the 23 IRI firms that reported data for each of the last six years. This is a small sample. To examine the validity of these trends, R&D intensity values were computed over six years for a much larger set of IRI companies (136) from Standard and Poor's Compustat database. The results of this analysis served to confirm the R&D intensity trend noted above. One of the important aspects of the IRI/CIMS Annual R&D Survey is the ability to link the survey results with those of other complementary databases.