An Information Transfer Model for Integrating Marketing and R&D Personnel in New Product Development Projects

Marketing and R&D personnel are key actors in the development of new product innovations. Interdependence between the marketing and the R&D functions necessitates integration. Rudy Moenaert and William Souder feel that task specification, structural design and climate orientation are the major integration mechanisms advocated in the literature. Supported by an extensive literature review, they propose a nomological network which interrelates integration mechanisms, interfunctional information transfer, uncertainty reduction and new product innovation success. They develop a causal framework to describe the determinants of successful information transfer between marketing and R&D in the development of technologically new products.     

Planning in India: Lessons from four decades of development experience

This paper argues that planning as practiced in India has in many respects failed to achieve national development objectives over the long term. Four different sets of factors can be identified as probably having contributed to this failure: (1) faulty premises and development strategies, (2) problematic and counterproductive implementation mechanisms, (3) the emergence of powerful interest groups that appropriate public resources and blocked needed policy reforms, and (4) the slowness to learn from experience and consequent lack of flexibility and adaptation. These forces were not mutually independent, and hence their relative importance is difficult to gauge precisely.     

An Analysis of the Use of Extrafunctional Information by R&D and Marketing Personnel: Review and Model

Successful technological innovation requires contributions from both technologists and marketers. Each group contributes information to the other, making the eventual use of this extrafunctional information a concern. In this article, Rudy Moenaert and William Souder report the findings of exploratory research conducted in Belgium and present a model to describe essential elements of this process. They argue that the value of extrafunctional information is determined by channel, message, source and receiver attributes. Further, this value is thought to vary throughout the stages of the innovation process and also to depend on organizational characteristics such as formalization, centralization, climate and the type of project structure.     

US Labour Relations in Transition: Emerging Strategies and Company Performance

This report examines strategic labour relations and operational changes pursued by large, highly unionized, US manufacturing companies over the 1975–86 period. Four fairly distinguishable strategies are identified as implemented across a sample of 105 companies. These strategies are characterized by various combinations of activities associated with union avoidance, deunionization and co-operation. In addition to describing these strategies, we examine changes in company performance associated with these strategies for a subsample of 56 companies. It is found that, on the one hand, improvements in company performance are associated with extensive cooperative efforts across unionized facilities, but, on the other hand, they are also associated with the opening of non-union facilities and the simultaneous closing of unionized facilities. In contrast, the closing of unionized facilities (but not non-union facilities) and the decertification of unions are negatively associated with company performance.