FIGURE 30.- The Flight Simulator for Advanced Aircraft at the NASA-Ames Research Center. This simulator is used to defined the handling qualities of new aircraft for many purposes ranging from FAA certification to aircraft carrier landings.

Another point has to do with the differing perspectives of a research center and agency headquarters. An organizational shift or realignment at the field level may be invisible to Headquarters. Our account of rotorcraft research at Ames may appear to make the process more dramatic than it really was; what actually occurred was a series of small, incremental actions that, cumulatively, gave Ames the dominant role within NASA in research on short-haul systems. To a degree, Headquarters in Washington neither encouraged nor discouraged these developments; in many cases, changes in research tasks at Ames never quite rose to the level of awareness of Headquarters officials. As Herbert Kaufman observed, certain organizational changes are the products "of a series of developments so small they are hardly noticed individually as they occur. Collectively... these insignificant changes could transform administrative structures without anyone ever having made a single, major deliberate decision to alter them." (ref. 72.) In effect, many changes in a center's research agenda occur in just so inconspicuous a way.

One final point pertains to what constitutes productivity in a research and development environment. Defining productivity calls to mind the perplexity of the philosopher in defining time: "I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled." Of course, there are measurable things reports,

FIGURE 33.-General wind tunnel capabilities as a function of time.

2000

$ M cost, ($ 1,000/hr)

papers, meetings, presentations, various engineering achievements which can be used as a yardstick. In the case of reports and patents, what matters is that the papers are actually read and the patents actually employed. Responding to an inquiry from the Office of Personnel Management, NASA attempted to measure productivity in its R&D programs. NASA cited productivity improvements in applying new technology within NASA, as well as productivity increases from management initiatives. Among the improvements cited were developing a computer-based, interactive library system at the Johnson Space Center to prepare and disseminate Space Shuttle payload integration documents; computerizing wind tunnels and other test facilities; automating NASA's logistics system; improving facilities management; installing wordprocessing systems, and the like.

Yet an agency can be "productive" in a certain sense without being productive in any sense that really matters, a point obliquely acknowledged by the authors of the report from which these examples are taken: “Within an R&D agency, only some of the traditional methods of measuring productivity are valid. Analysis of NASA's experience indicates that only about 20 percent of its total civil service effort is amenable to traditional techniques of measuring productivity. These are in areas of general services and technical support where outputs are reasonably structured, routine, and repetitive." (ref. 73.) The major difficulty faced by research managers in justifying their budgets is the lag between the employment of a research result and its development in the laboratory. The funding agency must, to some extent, take it on faith that the results generated in the laboratory will actually be employed in other words, be productive. This unresolved dilemma has led to a situation in which research and development is almost impossible to justify prospectively. The solution of this problem of justifying research for which there is seemingly no payoff is of the utmost importance, and we will return to it in our final chapter.

CHAPTER V

The Structure of Technology
Development Laboratories

Obstacles to Technical Innovation

The laboratory is the linchpin of technology development. To understand where and how (or if) innovation occurs, one must begin here. With certain significant exceptions, the organizational structures tend to be quite similar for all research and development organizations, independent of the organization's functions. This is so because all of these institutions live with the built-in conflict between flexibility and the organization's formal mission. Professional people need the flexibility to start new projects or terminate existing ones; change the distribution of effort between in-house staff and contractors; transfer funds between tasks or projects without the need for prior approval by the laboratory director; or encourage people involved in fundamental research to communicate with those doing applied research, and even to transfer from one group to the other. Indeed, at the project level the most important function of the manager may be to motivate the project team, rather than to make decisions which are both unilateral and final (ref. 74).

Yet there is a limit - easier to sense than to define precisely — to the flexibility a laboratory director will allow his professional staff. The laboratory is constrained (or driven) by its mission, by its budget, by the particular skills it needs, and, paradoxically, by that need to innovate which tends to destroy its stability. In a laboratory without a strong sense of mission, flexibility may degenerate into a situation where professionals all "do their own thing." But in a laboratory where every research task is yoked to an overriding agenda, there may be no room for that relatively modest amount of basic research needed to keep the organization abreast of the state of the art, to prepare for new goals and missions.

Thus the burdens of research management are imposed by the nature of the organization. There is, first, the problem that once any organization attains a certain size, coordinating the work of the various divisions consumes much of senior management's time. Different departments are sealed off from each other; the paperwork needed to process (say) a procurement action increases; and routine tends to drive out innovation.