The Investment System in the Firm

Abstract

This A5 booklet was the first of a series of monographs reporting on the work of IOR’s Industrial Research Fund, which was launched in 1964 on the initiative of Sir Charles Goodeve to sponsor exploratory studies in fields of shared interest to UK industrial firms. The fund’s seven initial sponsors, in the steel, oil, coal, engineering, chemical and food sectors, formed an IOR Industrial Panel to agree on research priorities. The members of the panel agreed on the management of capital investment projects as an initial topic of study, and pilot studies were conducted in three of the sponsoring firms. The insights reported here were followed up by studies in more depth which were reported in 1971 in a paper The Management of Capital Investment which was presented and discussed at a meeting of the Royal Statistical Society in London. The paper and the discussion were subsequently published in Series A (General) of the Society’s Journal (Luck, GM, Morgan JR, Farmer PJ and Stringer J, Volume 134, No. 4, 1971, pp 485-533). The main findings were then published in 1973 in one of a series of general management booklets by Mantec Publications of Rugby (Managing Capital Investment: the “Total Investment System”, by James Morgan and Michael Luck).