The tensions between marketing and research and development (R&D) are so common that we have come to accept them as the way organizations are. If we remain resigned like this, how will we ever reap some of the benefits that can accrue from these groups working better together? If we can improve the working relationships between marketing and R&D, researchers promise a variety of desirable organizational outcomes, such as cycle-time reduction and new product success.This article describes in detail the changes that a Fortune 500 company made to its product development process to foster synergy between marketing and R&D. The modified process formalized the roles of marketing and R&D at both the front and back ends of the product development process, increasing productive interaction between the groups. The company found that at the front end, marketing and R&D needed to work together (1) to clarify the market requirements implicit in the market attack plan and (2) to develop a technical strategy that responded to the market requirements and that consequently implemented the market attack plan. At the back end, the groups needed to work together (3) to formulate the value messages used to market the company's products. The synergy created between marketing and R&D through the new process is credited for enabling the company to compete successfully in a market it never before had entered.
The Software Technology Program of MCC is investigating the early part of the design process, before requirements are established, for large-scale distributed systems. Face-to-face meetings are an important activity during this phase of a project since they provide a medium for direction, exploration, and consensus building. Project Nick is attempting to apply automated facilities to the process, conduct, and semantic capture of design meetings. Primary topics covered in this paper are meeting analysis, meeting augmentation, and a model of meeting progression that serves as the framework for our work.
Reputation systems are complex social systems that continually collect, aggregate, and distribute feedback about a person, an organization, a scholarly work, or some other entity, based on the assessments of others from their interactions or experiences with the entity. A reference model, or meta-specification, is presented that describes the essential functionality and behavior that embedded information systems need to provide to be effective and useful mechanisms for making reputation explicit and measurable. † The reference model, based on a multi-disciplinary understanding of reputation, is specified in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) since it is the industry-standard approach for modeling systems. The model addresses systems that focus on the reputation of individuals (personal reputation). Extensions for the reputation of corporate, not-for-profit, and governmental organizations (organizational reputation) are described in the conclusion along with challenges for future research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.