Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Controlling, grade: 1,7, Technical University of Braunschweig (Institut für Controlling und Unternehmensführung), course: Performance Measurement, language: English, abstract: Encouraged by an increasing globalization, the car manufacturing industry expanded to growing markets such as China, which is with about a demand of 19.3 million vehicles in 2013 the biggest market in the world. Due to the different habits of customers' worldwide and changing laws there is a high demand for innovations of alternative fuel vehicles, lightweight materials and connectivity. In order to provide alternative mobility concepts, efficient and comprehensive technology, the European car manufacturing industry invested over 32 billion Euros into Research and Development (R&D) in 2012. This investment is around 25% of the total R&D spending in the European Union. These investments demonstrate the importance of developing new products in the car manufacturing industry to obtain a competitive position in the global market. To ensure the profitability of developing projects it is important to keep balance between creativity during the innovation process and costs. Controlling helps the management to keep this balance and to measure the performance of new development projects. Therefore, performance measurement can be used.