About this issue

This is one of the issues (in contrast to some of our special issues and special sections) that covers a wide range of topics on the management of Research, Development, and Engineering, (R, D, &E). The topics range across the spectrum of the R, D, &E process — from the kind of problem solving that goes on in technical groups to considerations of customer response to product characteristics. They cover considerations of personnel, organizational and business structure, marketing, and finance — common components of general business or management education. An interesting feature of this set of papers is the large percentage written by people who are not in academia (an occasional criticism of the authors of papers in some of our issues). Two of the four papers are written by people currently in industry and the co-author of a third recently worked in a government agency. We would like to maintain such a balance of “academic” vs. “non-academic” authors and have been making efforts to encourage more papers from practicing managers and industrial or government staff members. The results of this three year campaign are beginning to pay off and we hope to continue to get high quality papers from both groups.