The Recommendation Adoption Score (RAS) gives UX research managers a numerical basis for resource allocation. Developed by Nielsen Norman Group, RAS measures the proportion of research recommendations that actually reach users: adopted recommendations count as full value delivered, committed recommendations count as partial progress, and everything else sits in the denominator as unrealized potential.
Most research leaders currently allocate talent based on intuition, internal politics, or whoever asks loudest. RAS replaces that with traceable data. The score exposes exactly where research value is leaking out of the pipeline, which means a manager can point to a specific team, project, or stakeholder relationship and say: this is where investment is wasted, this is where it compounds.
This is the third article in a series. The first two defined research breakage and introduced the RAS formula. This one covers the strategic layer: how leaders actually use the score to justify decisions, shift resources, and move from output metrics to outcome metrics. The methodology behind the scoring and the full argument for why this changes research strategy is in the original.
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