| Abstract: | This article deals with “newness,” an important characteristic of research-and-development (R&D) projects. Newness consumes resources and provides effectiveness or profit, and is mainly considered to be of a qualitative nature yielding only to an expert's intuition. This article is focused on a numerical measure of newness and the closely connected concept of technological advance. The measure is described in a technical parameter space against a set of analogous objects, presented by its center, eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Specific features and behavior of the selected measure of newness are analyzed. A numerical example is also included. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. |
