In many ways, the development of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet plane serves as an object lesson about the hazards of globalization of new product codevelopment and manufacturing. Over many years, Boeing had built its own aircraft design facilities, aircraft manufacturing plants and suppliers in Everett, Washington, near Seattle. That changed with the Dreamliner.

The establishment of a separate accounting line for environmental, health and safety related purchases is essential. This allows you to clearly track monies expended for this purpose.

David Dooling, Ph.D., assistant director of informatics at the Genome Institute at Washington University, discusses the challenges associated with tackling vast amounts of data in large sequencing labs and shares his experiences in building and utilizing an advanced LIMS for data tracking and storage.

We all know the form of classic networking, and people in sales or supply chain management pioneered it for business purposes. It’s where they meet casually with colleagues. Maybe the individuals involved don’t work for the same company.

Change has always been an issue for every generation and it often makes people feel extremely uncomfortable. I find that people don’t mind change if it was their idea, but when faced with a change someone else has made, it can cause a major dis

Structure drives behavior. The way your organization is structured—flat, crossfunctional, hierarchical or “siloed”—will drive the way your staff behaves. Think operationally, not correlationally.....

The FDA and other regulatory agencies consider the integrity of laboratory data to be an integral part of the drug manufacturing process. Deficiencies of out-of-specification (OOS) investigations continue to be the major cause of warning letters in the pharmaceutical industry.

There are several forces driving globalization of R&D. The first is to better target the R&D needs and markets of other nations. A second is to spread the costs of large projects between two partners or more to reduce the risks and costs incurred by each partner. A third is to promote the sale of the R&D results to the countries in which the R&D took place.

Recognize this mobile phone commercial cliché? Well, you might be hearing it in your lab as this phrase is repeated more and more—not relating to poor cell phone service, but the insides of buildings and laboratories.

The only thing that changed was the title. The job, the responsibilities, even the pay were exactly the same, but when the title was changed to director, the relationships, levels of trust, gossip and impediments to getting things done were all out of whack for a couple of months. This is a situation that takes more than simple explanations to fix.

No matter how prepared new researchers think they are for the hazards they’re going to encounter in the lab, it’s pretty likely they’re eventually going to have some type of mishap that reminds them that firsthand experience has no substitute.