A unified approach to the acquisition of subjective data in R&D

Many quantitative models have been developed and tried in the R&D management environment. Although very successful in providing an insight framework, their actual everyday use appears to have been limited. Although there could be many reasons for this, one of the main ones is the general problem of data collection. The subjective nature of the topic makes this inherently difficult. A new approach to this problem is presented here which is based on a method of prioritized hierarchies, backed up by a simple procedure of pairwise comparisons. A case study is presented of a group decision-making activity based in a research environment. Numerical results are given which show how the participants behaved in practice.