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This paper aims to investigate whether the assumption of bias-free journalism is violated. If there is systematic news coverage bias inherent in business journalism, certain kinds of companies will have a systematically higher or lower visibility in business news. Such differential corporate visibility may undermine the validity of research that is based solely on business news as a data source.

A set of hypotheses is developed and statistically tested, concerning the corporate characteristics associated with business media coverage. Coverage of the 100 largest Finnish companies is examined within the three foremost Finnish business publications. Methodologically, uncorrelated principal components in regression analyses are used.

The main finding is that that financially low-performing companies and growing companies receive less coverage than well-performing or shrinking companies, indicating a possible bias in journalistic sourcing, attention or selection. Consequently, such companies may be relatively under-represented in data sets derived solely from business news sources.

Significantly greater in-depth understanding of the phenomenon could be obtained through studying the biases at play in day-to-day journalistic practices within editorial offices and news desks, which is beyond the present study. The study cautions against single sourcing strategies reliant on business news alone, and it strongly recommends that future studies complement business news data with other, non-news sources.

Organizational metrics such as financial performance appear to influence corporate visibility in business news, which may therefore skew individuals’ and investors’ attitudes to corporations. The existence of coverage bias is methodologically consequential because management research often sources data from business news, especially in event-based studies.

This study provides evidence that media visibility is influenced by company performance and change in company size, which could contribute to bias in business news coverage. This should be taken into account in future studies that use business news data.

Comprehensive R&D project valuation calls for internal information on, for example, R&D investments as well as external information such as market projections that relate to the expectations on product's life and revenue cash flows. Given the versatility of information needs, the valuation is generally expected to be challenging during R&D. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the perceived feasibility of R&D project valuation in real‐life organizations and discuss possibilities to increase the relevance of measurement for managing value creation.

The study is based on empirical data gathered by a questionnaire targeted at companies representing different industries in Finland. The data are analyzed in terms of company size, R&D intensity and the nature of the development activity (product or service).

The results describe how the managers responsible for R&D experience the importance and measurability of different elements potentially relevant for the success of a project. It was discovered that things that were considered important were generally perceived as challenging to apply in practice.

The paper lists several managerial activities for improving R&D evaluation practices. As a managerial contribution, the paper develops a framework for identifying different types of measurement elements.

Based on the empirical findings, a number of suggestions are made for improving the measurement of various elements of value. The paper elaborates the potential role of a number of indirect and less obvious aspects in association with R&D project value: the features of developed product's life cycle, created intellectual capital, emerging real options and windows of opportunity.

Evaluation of product development projects is quite intuitive and subjective. The purpose of this paper is to analyze decision makers' value perceptions of organizational impact before and after a project to explain how post‐project value perceptions are formed.

The research approach is hypothetic‐deductive and uses questionnaire data from 126 risky product development projects.

Pre‐project value perceptions explain post‐project value perceptions at a significant level and in a different way for different value dimensions. The results reveal two moderating effects by using a product development control system, and different product types.

The study was limited to risky product development projects with external funding and their retrospective cross‐sectional survey. The findings imply a strong relation between the early‐stage value estimates and the latter‐stage value estimates, which may make change decisions difficult in risky projects.

The initial value priorities of the managers have an important role in escalating commitment, and such value priorities can be reflected in the use of formal evaluation criteria.

Many studies express the need to understand the organizational impacts of projects better and take them into account in decision making. This empirical study on the perceptions of managers offers evidence on the formation and evolution of the perceived organizational impact during the project.