The Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) Rapid Product Development (RPD) Project is an international partnership formed to build a pre-competitive research and development program that will address the integration of new technologies in manufacturing and provide an infrastructure for industry to cooperate much more closely in the product development cycle. In this explanatory paper, a research trend of the RPD project is briefly presented, together with its background and state-of-the-art, focusing on objectives and target results of its sub-projects which include rapid development of functional parts and tools, validation and reverse engineering, and information logistic system.