Approaches and requirements to develop and improve the standard processes for a research and development organization

With the increased complexity of man‐made systems and software and the higher quality R&D results that are expected in today's R&D environment, it has become increasingly necessary to effectively define and improve the R&D standard processes specifically tailored for our organization and projects. To meet these needs, we have defined R&D standard processes based on international standards for systems and software engineering and on our existing traditional work methods, and then applied them to our ongoing projects. Now, we are improving our defined R&D standard processes continuously by monitoring of our processes and products and checking feedback from application results. In this paper, we introduce the R&D standard processes developed by our organization, the E Research Institute in Korea, and define the requirements and approaches used for their development and improvement. We compare our defined R&D standard processes with ISO/IEC 15288, which is the international standards for systems engineering, and summarize what we have learned through the development and improvement of our processes. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 9: 35–44, 2006