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This paper seeks to deal with the history of Research and Development (R&D) management. It takes the history of the R&D Department of the Royal Philips Electronics of The Netherlands as an example to unravel the dynamics behind industrial R&D management.

This paper is based upon historical and theoretical studies on industrial R&D institutions and research cultures.

The paper proposes that the directors of the Philips R&D Department continually shaped and reshaped the organization in order to retain researchers with creative ideas, and to stimulate innovativeness. The R&D‐management was the outcome of a search process that comprehended a mixture of scientific and industrial (management) skills, knowledge and expertise, which together shaped an industrial research culture. One of the most difficult questions for the research managers was to find a balance between the professional status and motives of individual researchers on the one hand and the Philips company production strategy on the other. Over the years, the research leaders stimulated individual creativity in their own way, taking specific business and economic circumstances into account. They operated during different historical periods that reflect their management ideas.

Nowadays, the Philips research takes place at the High Tech Campus. Its philosophy is based upon Chesbrough's open innovation paradigm. In the discussion of this paper, it is argued that the history of industrial research teaches that the success of this organization, as in the past, will depend upon the management's ability to find a balance between scientific activities and industrial production.

To analyze the market reception of multi-authored works of art through the lens of collaborative old master paintings (“formal/prestige collaboration”). This paper tests whether multi-authored attribution strategies (i.e. naming two artists as brand names) affect buyers' willingness to pay differently from single-authored works in the auction market.

This case study focuses on collaborative paintings by Flemish masters, based on a data set comprising 11,630 single-authored and collaborative paintings auctioned between 1946 and 2015. Hedonic regressions have been employed to test whether or not co-branded artworks are differently valued by buyers and how the reputation of each artist might influence valuation.

Despite the opportunity for buyers to purchase one artwork with two brand names, this study reveals that the average value of collaborative paintings is statistically lower than that of single-authored paintings. This is especially true when a reputed master was involved in the collaboration. The present findings suggest that the valuable characteristics of formal collaborations (i.e. double brand name, dual authorship and reputation, high-quality standards) are no longer perceived and valued as such by buyers, and that co-branding can affect the artist brand equity because of a contagion effect. We argue that integral authorship is more valued than partial authorship, suggesting that the myth of the artist as a lone genius is still well-anchored in purchasing habits.

Prestige collaborations are a very particular form of early co-branding in the art world, with limited data available. Further research should consider larger samples to reiterate the analysis on other collaboration forms in order to challenge the current findings.

Researchers and living artists should be aware that brand building and co-branding are marketing strategies that may generate negative effects on prices in the art market. The perceived and market value of co-branded works are time-varying, and depends on both the context of reception of these works and the reputation of the artists at time t.

This market segment has never been considered in art market studies, although formal collaboration is one of the earliest documented forms of co-branding in the art world. This paper provides new empirical evidence from the auction market, based on buyers' willingness to pay, and it further highlights the reception of multi-authored art objects in Western art markets that particularly value individual creators.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify whether there are differences in the implementation of quality management (QM) and the results achieved, based on the position of the person responsible for QM and his/her strategic priorities.

Data from 256 firms that have implemented QM are collected. A multigroup analysis with LISREL is employed to contrast the hypotheses using a sample of general managers on the one hand and of quality managers on the other.

This study shows that QM is stronger implemented when it is headed by the general manager than by the quality manager. The authors also find that in both samples of general managers and quality managers, only one of the three strategic priorities analyzed, cost orientation, shows a positive effect on financial results. When the influence of QM on financial results is considered, the relationship is significant just in the case of the sample of quality directors.

The limitations of the analysis performed suggest lines of research that can substantially enrich the analysis of the role of management in the implementation of QM systems. A first step would be to expand the study sample, since the subsample for general managers was not very large. Gathering more recent data could contribute to strengthening the results obtained and to identifying additional explanatory variables. For example, information on functional experience or training could clarify the strategic focus adopted by managers.

This study highlights that the general manager's commitment to quality confers greater credibility in the rest of the organization. Although the general managers impose greater implementation of QM, they do not perceive that this influences the financial results achieved directly. The incorporation of strategic priorities in this study also shows that the perception of differentiation in marketing in firms that have implemented QM is similar both for quality managers and for general managers. However, the former (quality managers) also show that differentiation in innovation has a positive effect on QM.

Literature has shown an indisputable consensus on the relevance of leadership and the commitment of top management to the success of QM, but few studies provide more in‐depth specific knowledge of the characteristics and actions developed by the person who leads the commitment to quality. This study tackles the role of the manager responsible for QM in the firm, based on his or her functional position, whether general manager or quality manager. It contributes by investigating how a manager's strategic priorities condition the level of QM implementation, as well as the financial performance achieved.

Current issues of Publishers' Weekly are reporting serious shortages of paper, binders board, cloth, and other essential book manufacturing materials. Let us assure you these shortages are very real and quite severe.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a quality management (QM) philosophy underlies the joint use of operations and human resource management practices, and the relationships with job-related contentment and performance.

Data from an economy-wide survey are used to test hypotheses via latent variable analyses (latent trait and latent class models) and structural equation models. The sensitivity of each path is then assessed using regression models.

Different elements rather than a unified philosophy are identified. A managerial approach that integrates total QM and just-in-time procedures is rare, but is associated with the quality of the product or service delivered. Labor productivity and quality are independent of the level of job-related contentment in the workplace. Although the average workforce is content, high involvement management and motivational support practices are associated with job anxiety. On the positive side, job enrichment is linked to labor productivity, thus suggesting potential gains through job design.

The study adds evidence from a national sample about a comprehensive range of management practices, and suggests distinct outcomes from different elements of QM. Additionally, it shows that performance expectations based on previous studies may not hold in large nationwide heterogeneous samples.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm called HelixPSO for finding ribonucleic acid (RNA) secondary structures that have a low energy and are similar to the native structure.

Two variants of HelixPSO are described and compared to the recent algorithms Rna‐Predict, SARNA‐Predict, SetPSO and RNAfold. Furthermore, a parallel version of the HelixPSO is proposed.

For a set of standard RNA test sequences it is shown experimentally that HelixPSO obtains a better average sensitivity than SARNA‐Predict and SetPSO and is as good as RNA‐Predict and RNAfold. When best values for different measures (e.g. number of correctly predicted base pairs, false positives and sensitivity) over several runs are compared, HelixPSO performs better than RNAfold, similar to RNA‐Predict, and is outperformed by SARNA‐Predict. It is shown that HelixPSO complements RNA‐Predict and SARNA‐Predict well since the algorithms show often very different behavior on the same sequence. For the parallel version of HelixPSO it is shown that good speedup values can be obtained for small to medium size PC clusters.

The new PSO algorithm HelixPSO for finding RNA secondary structures uses different algorithmic ideas than the other existing PSO algorithm SetPSO. HelixPSO uses thermodynamic information as well as the centroid as a reference structure and is based on a multiple swarm approach.

This paper examines the depth, erudition, and rigor of contemporary research on knowledge management as a causal factor that influences the ultimate outcome of multinational corporation (MNC) expansion, bounded by the confines of information and communication technology (ICT) competences identified as behavioral, business, and technological. Through discussion highlighting the dominant knowledge management (KM) research themes within the milieu of the global firm, readers will gain definitive and practical insight into relevant topics that may be used to stimulate development of growth strategies for the firm.