An adoption model was proposed to examine the influence of four types of organizational factors- organizational capacity, organizational structure, operating environment and grantmaking orientation- on the adoption of four effectiveness best practices, formal evaluation, knowledge management, leadership development and operating grants in philanthropic foundations. Data were collected from a national survey of foundations and the Foundation Center database. The results indicate that the grantmaking orientation of a foundation is the greatest indicator of adoptive behavior. Furthermore, capacity constraints are most relevant to the adoption decision when the adopting practice requires significant investments of time, money and expertise. Given the social and political context in which the effectiveness best practices are associated, this dissertation research has broad relevance for the ways in which foundation behavior is perceived and the means by which that behavior is shaped through policy and practice.

The scope of this project includes a re-engineering of the internal architecture of the Solicitation Management System (SMS), a web-based application that facilitates the running of grant proposal solicitations for the Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization at California State University San Bernardino (CSUSB). A goal of the project is to increase consistency and efficiency of the code base of the system, making it easier to understand, maintain, and extend. The previous version of SMS was written to rely on the Spring and Hibernate frameworks. The project includes a restructuring of the system to remove reliance on the Spring framework, but maintain reliance on Hibernate. The result is an updated version of the SMS. The system was written using current technologies such as Java, JSP, and CSS.

The Online Solicitation Management System (OSMS) is a web-based system designed for California State University, San Bernardino's Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization (OTTC) to run grant proposal solicitations more efficiently. The system accepts grant proposals, finds the best matched evaluators, calculates evaluation scores, and generated reports. Users in the system are divided into five (5) different roles: system administrator, program officer, staff, evaluator and applicant.

This project updated the California State University, San Bernardino's Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization's Solicitation Management System (SMS) software, used to facilitate the processing of grant proposal solicitations. The SMS software update improved the interface so that it is more user-friendly, increased the processing speed, and added additional functions necessary to comply with new requirements. The software was rewritten using the Spring and Hibernate frameworks.

The main purpose of this project is to develop new functionalities for the Solicitation Management System (SMS) to support the Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization (OTTC), California State University San Bernardino (CSUSB) and the Center for the Commercialization of Advanced Technology (CCAT), San Diego State University (SDSU) for the 2008 solicitation, which opened on 28 Jan 2008. SMS is a system built to facilitate the processing of grant proposal solicitations. The SMS was first built in 2004 and was primarily used by the OTTC, CSUSB for its solicitation activities. The new version of the SMS is more user friendly, so that it is easier for users to use and comprehend. The purpose of this software is to aid the processing of a solicitation for organizations that conduct solicitations for grant proposals.