understand the need to meet deadlines and to
produce intelligence-oriented studies rather than
detached scholarly reports or extensive catalogues
without assessments.
Contracts with industrial R&D firms worked
well as long as OSI insisted that the firm appoint
a competent project leader to manage the work.
Frequently problems arose from the tendency of a
firm to use a project leader for other jobs.
Contracts with such firms had the advantage, however,
of benefitting from technical capabilities of the
firm as a whole in that the project leader could
call for assistance from a diversified S&T staff of
specialists already on the payroll. The effective-
ness of academic-type research projects undertaken
by non-profit organizations seems to lie somewhere
between that of university work and that of indus-
trial firms; non-profit organizations have some
of the advantages and disadvantages of each of
the other two.
Probably the most effective contracts for
the money spent were those with private individuals.
Many of the contracted individuals were not only
competent technically but frequently had a strong
intellectual interest in the subject matter as
well as a regard for their personal reputations,
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