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1、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 of risk and the applica

2、tion 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 software, the Internet, and th

3、e 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 in developed countries o

4、riginates 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 opportunity; for overinvest

5、ment 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 that past performance i

6、s 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 fifty years (3), and t

7、hat 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 was in part determined b

8、y 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 about the relationship

9、 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 hire a “new boy.”The s

10、econd 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 evaluating investments

11、 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 return (IRR) and risk wei

12、ghted 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 innovations had long ges

13、tation 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 distinction is profound for

14、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 discussions of “value cha

15、ins,” 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 the corporate community b

16、y 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 the sum of the EVAs

17、 added by the enterprise in each successive year.)EVA is an estimate of true “economic profit,” or the amount by which earnings exceed or fall short of the required minimum rate of return that shareholders and lenders might earn by investing in alternative securities of comparable risk.The Crisis in

18、 Valuation; When Market Value Didnt TrackMarket Value For professional investors in securities, the bottom line is not economic return, it is total shareholder return (TSR), defined as the appreciation of the stock price plus dividend payments. This is “cash is king” reasoning, since liquid securiti

19、es and cash dividends mean cash to an investor. To money managers, total return is also their report card. In such a world, the Market Value of a stock is the final metric, and Economic Value is but one component of it. Investors also gauge each firms strategic position, plus other factors contribut

20、ing to Market Value such as investor sentiment and macroeconomic trends. Shareholder value has largely come to be synonymous with current market value-stock price-and executives or directors who ignore this reality do so at considerable peril.Economic Value A part of the crisis in valuation arose fr

21、om the growing differences between market value and the accountants perspective of valuation based on historical cost. While this circumstance could, in principle, have resulted from smart management delivering superior cash flows, this explanation did not hold up when the actual cash flow projectio

22、ns of the companies were considered. Young is based on cash flow anticipated in the next five years-the outer limit of the proverbial “short-term”. Thus, more than 75 percent of the valuation of the total stock market must be related to something other than short-term economic value. In this scenari

23、o, as long as perceptions of opportunity grew faster than economic capital, the growth sector would outperform the “value” sector, and hence would attract more investment. This cascade effect would result in higher price-earnings ratios, since the price-to-earnings metric is tied to current economic

24、 performance. That is what occurred in the marketplace during the decade of the 1990s.Investors in effect equated investment in ”value” stocks as investment in stocks with limited opportunities, and favored the ”growth” sector.During the 1990s, as the valuation gap was growing, a host of articles be

25、gan to extend the venerable concept of intellectual property to the concept of intellectual orKnowledge capital, which added an important new dimension to intangible assets. Some writers even choose to define intellectual capital as the difference between market value and the value of the tangible a

26、ssets. This approach is exemplified by this quotation: The greatest challenge facing any organization today is in understanding the huge differential between its balance sheet and market valuation. This gap represents the core value of the company its Intellectual Capital.From this traditional base,

27、 the concept was now extended to include the knowledge of the organization and its employees, and its ability to learn. It thus went far beyond the more limited concepts of know-how and trade secrets. Most importantly, there was recognition that intellectual and human capital could far outweigh tang

28、ible capital for valuation purposes.This insight was important, but yet not very definitive. But the idea of intellectual capital is a new one,” wrote P.H. Sullivan ,”it brings to the foreground the brainpower assets of the organization, recognizing them as having a degree of importance comparable t

29、o the traditional land, labor, and tangible assets. If a survey were conducted, there would be agreement that many modern companies are filled with intellectual capital: law firms, consulting firms, software companies, computer companies to name but a few. But if the survey went on to ask people to

30、define what intellectual capital is, there would be a wide range of answers. These answers would not converge onto one straightforward definition of intellectual capital, but rather on many. The range of views and the number of terms used to describe and define intellectual capital are broad, withou

31、t a clear focus, and often confusingTechnology appraisalA practical application of the economic value approach to intellectual property developed considerably during the 1990s.It has been termed technology appraisal. The approach is basically a DCF valuation of a pro forma business plan incorporatin

32、g the technology being appraised .Technology appraisal has been used primarily for tax purposes: for example, the valuation of patents donated to universities by companies such as Dow Chemical or the valuation of in-process R&D in mergers and acquisitions. DuPont published a detailed description of

33、typical technology appraisal methodology in connection with the completion of its acquisitions of Pioneer International and DuPont Merck. A number of consultants and accounting firms now offer technology appraisal services.New trends in corporate finance, and a new toolkit, are naturally to be expec

34、ted to cause structural changes in industrial R&D. In fact, the changes that have taken place in the past two decades have been remarkably far-reaching.The Impact of Leveraged Buyouts (LBOs)The 1980s marked the advent of the leveraged buyout era and its sibling, the high- yield or “junk” bond. The e

35、ra culminated spectacularly in the RJR bidding war, depicted in the book and subsequent movie, Barbarians at The Gate (38), the book, The Predators Ball (39), and the imprisonment of prominent participants for insider trading and securities violations. About $400 billion of LBO s were financed in th

36、e decade of the 1980s.Excessive bids, such as for RJR, caused a broad collapse of the first junk bond market, but the technique is alive and well as a more sophisticated generation of LBO firms, backed by institutional funds, trawls the industrial marketplace for new buyout opportunities.LBO s were

37、generally financed with 10 percent or less equity put up by limited partners and 90 percent by bank loans and subordinated debt, typically in the form ofHigh yield bonds floated by Drexel Burnham Lambert and others. An LBO becomes aPossibility when the share price of the target company has fallen to

38、 a level where the required debt to purchase the company can be paid down quickly by a combination ofasset sales and cash flow from operations. Ideally, the company is purchased with its own assets, leaving the investors with a large profit after the debt burden is eliminated.The LBO strategy is not

39、 one of maximizing value; it is one of maximizing cash flow. The target company may be substantially depleted of physical and intellectual capital at the end of the game. Ironically, however, an LBO comes into play when managements efforts to enhance value have either failed, or are perceived by the

40、 marketplace to be failing.There were lasting effects from this traumatic period, some beneficial and some less so. Managements rapidly became more disciplined about value creation when it became apparent that they were vulnerable to a raid, or were missing opportunities toenhance shareholder value.

41、 The notion was that if shareholders could benefit from streamlining, downsizing, etc. management would do it before the raiders arrived to do it for them. Corporations shed expensive frills, such as costly headquarters, unprofitable divisions, and pet projects, to focus on core operations, and to s

42、crutinize new acquisitions and capital investments from an economic value viewpoint. The well-publicized reign of Jack Welch at General Electric symbolized many of the elements of this approach.The effects on R&D finance were significant: long-term R&D, and R&D not targeted to existing businesses, w

43、as often curtailed to shore up short-term cash flow. This process took place not only within companies that were in LBO mode, but also in companies that considered themselves LBO targets. Many large central research centers were downsized or eliminated, and those that remained were tied directly to

44、strategic business units (Subs), which had now become the focus of value creation. In addition, a typical corporate reaction to external threats was to merge with others in the industry, and create value by eliminating duplicate headquarters, sales organizations, and R&D operations. The elimination

45、of these costs clearly generated economic value; the issue would be how much of it came at a cost in strategic value.Source: F. Peter Boer .Financial Management of R&D. Research Technology Management，2002, pp1-28译文:研发财务管理研发财务管理的思想演变发展远远超过基本的现金贴现现金流模型，财务的研发工具中已经发展到了智力资本的价值，其中包括定量价值的评估。解剖风险要素和实物期权理论的应

46、用是财务研发新的特点，同时融资工具也在发生变化，风险资本和私人股本资金大量激增。分析师的工具箱已经被提高到了电子表格，网上数据库，蒙特卡罗软件，互联网，以及无处不在的个人电脑。工业研发是典型的递延收益与高风险投资的项目，这个对工业社会的公司尤其至关重要，发达国家50%的财富来自产品技术创造的研发。但是衡量价值创造和价值之间的差异是不容易区别的，其混乱的原因是在会计惯例中把这项财务费用当作一项开支，而不是一项投资，不把它作为一个基本的研发问题，也不把过去业绩作为未来指标。在过去的十五年，商业、金融和学术界在面对困难的测量问题面前，不断地改善和发展研发分析和管理的测量问题，在战后的第一阶段，产业研

47、发被认为是一项具有研发创造性的管理事业。其中主要财务指标是年度预算（一个工具基本上不足以评估一个投资）。预算是按行业基准确定的，比如研发作为费用占收入的比例来确定一部分的。因此研发人员的财务技能主要集中在成本会计和成本控制。在许多公司，高层管理人员（通常是缺乏研发人员的经验）没有对价值关系到成本进行探索，并试图以管理一个简洁描述为“管理经验出来功能”的管理。换言之，穷人的研发返回被看做比对一个公司的战略，这个解决方案导致的后果是产品的管理不善，更是经常被形容为一个新聘请来的男孩。第二阶段，在20世纪70年代，越来越多的投资风险评估被金融分析师引入研发，可以形容为“明显的胜利DCF法(贴现现金流

48、)。DCF法在评估投资的使用是一个重要的步骤，因为它引入了商业计划纪律中的风险因素的概念，并帮助协调了技术和非技术人员的沟通分歧。工具包中包含净现金流量折现现值（NPV）的回报率（内部收益率）和风险加权资本成本内部收益率。但它是在实践过程中过度使用贴现率，以及过度和保守终值相结合，谴责任何长期研发的项目。结果是违背了行业中认为创新是长期酝酿的最赚钱的这一共同经验。在过去二十年，这个词的价值已成为固定的业务词汇。不幸的是，这俩个无所不在的词语有很不同的背景：经济价值和市场价值。这俩种价值形式并不是完全相同的，这种区别是深刻的研发因为最初是科斯廷创新的经济价值，但它往往也是市场价值驱动。经济价值明

49、确经济价值这一词的概念，调用商业行话，是作为经济增加值（EVA），并含蓄地对“价值链”和价值命题的讨论。一个企业的经济价值是取决于它的自由现金流量预测总结其资本成本贴现。EVA的概念，虽然可以追溯到斯隆，通用汽车公司的传奇总裁，但重新被引入到企业是在20世纪90年代的戴尔公司，具有相当的影响。EVA是指净营业利润对在企业全部资本投资的机会成本的适当收取。（EVA与经济之间的价值关系很简单：经济仅仅是价值的EVA的款项，则每连续三年在企业相加。）EVA是一个真正的经济利润，或者死收入数额超过投资所要求的最低回报率，且与其他证券的投资风险相比，股东和贷款人的收入周期比较短。市场价值对于证券专业投资者来说，底线不是经济回报，而是股东回报（TSR），即股价加分红。这是“现金为王”的推理，因为液体证劵和现金股利平均现金的总回报是基金经理的成绩单。在这样的一个世界，股票的市场价值作为它的组成部分是最后的度量和经济价值。投资者同时还衡量每个企业的战略地位，以及在加上其他因素造成的市场价值，如投资者情绪和宏观经济趋势。股东价值在很大程度上