Applied research objectives
One of the eternal problems with applied research is how to rank competing projects. In a “previous article”, I described breeding objectives and their importance. Unfortunately, breeding objectives is a misnomer, which implies that those objectives are meant only for breeding. Although they have been formalised by breeders, these objectives reflect the effect of ‘a unit change of a trait on profit, relative to other traits’. There is no mention to how that change is achieved.
This is no minor point, because it allows us to use breeding objectives to evaluate the effect of any technique (for example, fertilisation and pruning) on traits of economic importance. The main difference with genetics is that these techniques require constant use, while a change through breeding is permanent.
Although a change of names may be seem as trivial, the fact is that an action like that would make life a lot easier. As a start, it would lower the barriers for enlisting the help of other researchers (or from other units of a company) to develop objectives that would be seen as beneficial across the organisation.
Coming back to applied research projects, they require improvement objectives (or profit objectives) to determine the impact of their operational use. This way we can rank applied research by their contribution to enterprise profit, independently of the means to achieve improved plantations.