Dissipative dynamics of open quantum systems and quantum correlations are topics of great actual interest. The former because of its necessity when describing realistic systems and the latter because quantum correlations enable, in general, genuine quantum protocols.This thesis aims to study physical processes relying on dissipation, also focusing on quantum correlations and their role in these processes, and on how to use dissipation to generate quantum correlations. We first introduce the reader to the various topics treated within the thesis which are connected to various research fields such as open quantum systems, quantum thermodynamics, quantum optics, and quantum information. Then, each chapter deals with a different subject.The first part of the thesis consists of two studies in the context of quantum thermodynamics. The first study concerns a protocol of work extraction exploiting a single thermal bath. The work, defined within thermodynamic resource theory, is extracted from a resource and stored into a bipartite system by turning on and off its internal interaction. Then, we apply this protocol to two relevant physical systems: two interacting qubits and the Rabi model. In both cases, we obtain a work extraction comparable with the bare energies of the systems. In the second study, we investigate quantum thermal machines based on two-stroke thermodynamic cycles using two baths at different temperatures. The working fluid is composed of systems with evenly spaced energy levels, and all the considered interactions are of the exchange type. We maximize the power of two different cycles, also focusing on the role of the machines waiting time.In the second part of this thesis, strongly connected to open quantum systems, we first study the Markovian and non-Markovian dynamics of a driven quantum harmonic oscillator within the collision model. While this is still a "work in progress" research project, we already have promising results such as the appearance of a non-adiabatic time-dependent term in the continuous limit of the Markovian dynamics. Then, we study the two-photon Dicke model in the bad-cavity limit, considering a quite general setup comprising finite temperature baths and coherent and incoherent drivings. We manage to derive an effective master equation for the qubits dynamics and compare it to the one-photon case. In the two-photon model, we point out an enhancement of the qubits spontaneous-like emission rate and an increment of the effective temperature perceived by the qubits. These differences lead to a faster generation of steady states with coherence and a richer dependence of the collective effects on temperature.In the last part of the thesis, we explore the connection between energy and entanglement in an arbitrary finite non-interacting bipartite system, also finding the minimum energy entangled states (MEESs), i.e., the states having the minimum energy amount for a given degree of entanglement. We also study how these states can be generated both through unitary and dissipative processes, finding for the latter that the MEESs are practically the cheapest ones to produce. Moreover, the MEESs can be connected among them through local operations and classical communication and seem to have remarkable connections to quantum thermodynamics and many-body physics. Finally, we analyze how to use our results to lower the energetic cost of different quantum information protocols.