Application of Operations Research to Development Decisions

It is the main argument of this paper that an efficient allocation of the development budget is a very different sort of a problem from the efficient conduct of a current operation. We attempt to show that the problem is essentially not one of choosing among specific end-product alternatives, but rather a problem of choosing a course of action initially consistent with a wide range of such alternatives, and of narrowing the choice as development proceeds. The implications, for the analyst, of viewing the development problem as this kind of problem are sketched in the concluding section of the paper.