Supporting collaborative process knowledge management in new product development teams

Knowledge centric activities of developing new products and services are becoming the primary source of sustainable competitive advantage in an era characterized by short product life cycles, dynamic markets and complex processes. We view new product development (NPD) as a knowledge-intensive activity. Based on a case study in the consumer electronics industry, we identify problems associated with knowledge management (KM) in the context of NPD by cross-functional collaborative teams. We map these problems to broad Information Technology enabled solutions and subsequently translate these into specific system characteristics and requirements, A prototype system that meets these requirements developed to capture and manage tacit and explicit process knowledge is further discussed. The functionalities of the system include functions for representing context with informal components, easy access to process knowledge, assumption surfacing, review of past knowledge, and management of dependencies. We demonstrate the validity our proposed solutions using scenarios drawn from our case study. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.