How can companies best integrate marketing and R&D? As product life-cycles and development cycles become ever shorter, and as increasing proportions of R&D are outsourced, linking the marketplace with the laboratory becomes both crucially important and increasingly difficult--especially for transnational companies with R&D sites often distant from markets and marketing operations.

This case study examines integration of marketing and R&D in the context of the free IBM Internet software--"Mapuccino"--which is available at IBM's corporate Web site and is known internally as "WebCutter". This software was developed at IBM's Haifa Research Laboratory in Israel.