Organisations can make different sorts of investments to be able to adapt to changing conditions. They can invest in research and development (R & D), in flexible equipment and they can defer investments as a means to accommodate. This report focuses on investments in research and development as a means to reduce risk.More particularly, the report aims to calculate the opportunity cost of investing in R&D by using the technique of "net present value". The main contributions arae to define the option of investing in R&Das swell as the payments caused by the different options.