This research outlines the practices that managers believe are critical for achieving quality management in applied research and development (e.g. R&D, process development, product development, and engineering) departments of manufacturing companies. Using these practices, comments from R&D managers, and the existing quality in R&D research literature, a model is developed that highlights the need for broad management practices, specific management practices, awareness of the R&D external environment, and a quality culture to achieve quality management in the R&D departments of manufacturing organizations.

Integrated product development (IPD) is an approach for developing new products focused on the early and active involvement of design, manufacturing, marketing and other key new product development (NPD) stakeholders in order to achieve cross-functional integration and concurrent execution of various NPD activities. The benefits of IPD are well known in both the academic literature and popular press, including significant reductions in NPD cycle time and costs. However, in spite of these benefits, for the majority of manufacturing organizations, IPD is not used on 100% of NPD projects. This research develops a model of the organizational contextual factors influencing the diffusion of IPD in organizations. Results of surveying 269 NPD managers indicate that the complexity of certain IPD practices and support for IPD directly influence IPD diffusion, while an innovative organizational climate and the complexity of the organization's NPD activities indirectly influence IPD diffusion through IPD support.

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Effectively managing information resources is an important activity contributing to the competitive advantage of modern organizations. Organizational knowledge workers must be able to search for pertinent information quickly and effectively. This research identifies the relative usefulness of the metadata elements associated with the Dublin Core metadata standard for the effective retrieval of three different information resources – structured business intelligence reports, structured spreadsheet reports, and unstructured reports in formats such as Word and PowerPoint. A survey of knowledge workers was conducted to determine the relative usefulness of the metadata elements for each of the three information resources and to develop a framework outlining where metadata tag requirements differ between such resources. Overall, the study and resulting framework emphasize the need for system developers and database management personnel to be cognizant of the type of information resources being used, and ensure that search metadata elements that are appropriate for these specific resources are in place.

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