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1、R&D研发投资-会计外文翻译词 作者： 日期：原文Financial Management of R&DFinancial thinking about R&D has evolved well beyond basic discounted cash flow models. Better tools have been developed to value intellectual capital, including the quantitative assessment of the value added by R&D. The dissection of the elements
2、of risk and the application of real options theory are new features of the R&D landscape. Financing vehicles have also changed with an enormous surge of venture capital and private equity funds. The analysts toolbox has been enhanced by electronic spreadsheets, on-line databases, Monte Carlo softwar
3、e, the Internet, and the ubiquitous personal computer.Industrial R&D is characteristically a high-risk investment with a deferred payoff. Its importance to industrial societies, and to individual firms within these economies, is paramount；Lau has estimated that more than 50% of the wealth creation i
4、n developed countries originates from technology, which is typically a product of R&D. However, R&D comes at a cost, and it is as capable of destroying value as creating it. Knowing the difference is crucial; the penalties for underinvestment can be a deteriorating competitive position and lost oppo
5、rtunity; for overinvestment it will be a slow erosion of the firms capital base.But measuring the difference between value creation and value destruction is not easy. One source of confusion is that accounting conventions treat R&D as an expense, not an investment. An even more fundamental issue is
6、that past performance is not a reliable guide to future performance.Faced by a measurement problem that is both difficult and important, the business financial and academic communities have continued improving their tools. As a result, R&D analysis and management has evolved dramatically in the past
7、 fifty years (3), and that evolution is far from over.In its first postwar phase, industrial R&D was viewed as a creative enterprise andIts management was left to the R&D directors. Their main financial metric was an annual budget (a tool basically inadequate to evaluate an investment). The budget w
8、as in part determined by industry benchmarks, such as R&D expense as a percentage of revenues. Accordingly, the financial skills of R&D executives were largely focused on cost accounting and cost control (4).In many companies, top management(often lacking personal experience in R&D)didnt have a clue
9、 about the relationship of value to cost, and attempted to manage the function by a process that has been pithily described(5)as “managing the manager”. In other words, poor R&D returns were viewed more as a product of poor management than a consequence of a firms strategy .The solution was often to
10、 hire a “new boy.”The second phase, in the 1970s, was the introduction of increasingly powerful tools for evaluating investments under risk being adopted by financial analysts to R&D, leading to a circumstance I would describe as “the apparent triumph of DCF (Discounted Cash Flow).”The use of DCF in
11、 evaluating investments was an important step forward in that it introduced the discipline of business plans, factored in the concept of risk, and helped bridge the communications gap between technical and non-technical executives. The DCF toolkit included net present value (NPV) internal rate of re
12、turn (IRR) and risk weighted cost of capital.” But as it was applied in practice, the use of excessive discount rates and overly conservative terminal values combined to condemn almost any long-term R&D. project. This result contradicted industrys common experience that many of the most profitable i
13、nnovations had long gestation periods.The word value has become a fixture of the business lexicon during the past two decades. Unfortunately, this omnipresent word is being used in two very different contexts: economic value and market value. The two forms of value are not at all the same. The disti
14、nction is profound for R&D, because innovation initially comes at a cost ion economic value, but is equally often a driver for market value!Economic ValueThe term Economic Value is invoked in much current business jargon, explicitlyIn such concepts as Economic Value Added (EVA), and implicitly in di
15、scussions of “value chains,” and “value propositions.” The economic value of an enterprise is determined by the projected sum of its free cash flows, discounted by its cost of capital. The EVA concept, although traceable to Albert P. Sloan, the legendary CEO of General Motors, was reintroduced to th
16、e corporate community by the firm Stern Stewart in the 1990s, with considerable impact. EVA is defined as net operating profit minus an appropriate charge for the opportunity cost of all capital invested in theEnterprise. (The relationship between EVA and Economic Value is simple: EconomicValue is just
