Effectively selling your ideas and those of your staff members to upper management is often what separates good lab managers from great ones. Failure to accomplish this is the main reason excellent ideas fall by the wayside. To sell ideas, you need to tap into the same creativity you and your staff used to conceive them.

Your research staff can play a role in the peer process by participating as referees for manuscripts. What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing so?

From screening job candidates to benchmarking laboratory performance and energy use, today's lab managers have a cornucopia of online tools to choose from.

Whether your R&D operation functions as one central laboratory or as several smaller laboratories, the location chosen can impact facets of your business differently. From personnel relocation to reducing operating costs, several factors should be taken into consideration when determining the best location for your lab.

With a good strategy and excellent execution, lab managers can take their careers to the next level, increasing their job satisfaction and fattening their wallets as well.

Sales and revenue growth are stalled at many companies in a variety of industries. As a result, these firms have frozen or reduced laboratory budgets and in some cases have reduced laboratory staffing levels. There are several ways laboratory managers can effectively respond to these situations.

Outsourcing laboratory work is usually done on the assumption that another laboratory is able to perform the work more cheaply and/or more rapidly while maintaining adequate quality of the results. Laboratory managers must study other laboratories to determine if this assumption is correct before outsourcing work to them.

Speed in completing product and process development projects means fewer surprises. There is less likelihood that the market has changed when teams complete projects and get new products to market quickly.