Ramp;D研发投资-会计外文翻译6000词.docx

原文 Financial Management of RD Financial thinking about RD 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 RD. The dissection of the elements of risk and the application of real options theory are new features of the RD landscape. Financing vehicles have also changed with an enormous surge of venture capital and private equity funds. The analyst’s toolbox has been enhanced by electronic spreadsheets, on-line databases, Monte Carlo software, the Internet, and the ubiquitous personal computer. Industrial RD 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 originates from technology, which is typically a product of RD. However, RD 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 overinvestment it will be a slow erosion of the firm’s capital base. But measuring the difference between value creation and value destruction is not easy. One source of confusion is that accounting conventions treat RD as an expense, not an investment. An even more fundamental issue is 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, RD analysis and management has evolved dramatically in the past fifty years (3), and that evolution is far from over. In its first postwar phase, industrial RD was viewed as a creative enterprise and Its’ management was left to the RD directors. Their main financial metric was an annual