Physical and Virtual Collaboration in New Product Development: A Comparative Analysis

The paper compares and contrasts the pros and cons of physical and virtual collocated teams within the context of New Product Development (NPD). The concept of formation of appropriate teams structure has been around for decades however, this topic has increasingly received growing attention and scrutiny over the last couple of decades. The selection, design and structure of teams have considerable impact on the performance and effectiveness of NPD process and its outcome. With the rapid developments and advancement of design aid tools and technologies and communication platforms to support the NPD processes the need to collocate physically the product design and development team physically becomes less prevalent. The implications of virtual teams, however, require further attention. This paper explores the developments of collocated teams with the NPD context. After a brief review of relevant literature, two case studies are presented from an on-going research project followed a comparative analysis using a framework developed by previous studies. The paper closes by highlighting the characteristics that are associated with effectively performing collocated teams.