In today’s challenging economic climate it is more important than ever for companies to acquire comparable competitive advantage in their market. While previous research has investigated the performance measurement of R&D as a whole organization, very little research has been done into the performance management for just the research function itself. This, however, is of particular interest to larger organizations. This paper (1) introduces a framework for performance measurement for industrial research, and (2) presents a set of clusters, representing the content dimension for measuring research organizations. Based on the clusters, we were able to evaluate the extent to which performance measurement in practice in different companies can be compared. We discovered that the clusters follow a particular consistent distribution across organizations when the clusters are ranked by importance. For this empirical analysis, data was collected through in-depth case studies including more than 60 interviews and thor