Supporting collaborative process knowledge management in new product development teams

Knowledge centric activities of developing new products and services are be coming the primary source of sustainable competitive advantage in an era ch aracterized by short product life cycles, dynamic markets and complex proce sses. We view new product development (NPD) as a knowledge-intensive activi ty. Based on a case study in the consumer electronics industry, we identify problems associated with knowledge management (KM) in the context of NPD b y cross-functional collaborative teams. We map these problems to broad Info rmation Technology enabled solutions and subsequently translate these into specific system characteristics and requirements, A prototype system that m eets these requirements developed to capture and manage tacit and explicit process knowledge is further discussed. The functionalities of the system i nclude functions for representing context with informal components, easy ac cess to process knowledge, assumption surfacing, review of past knowledge, and management of dependencies. We demonstrate the validity our proposed so lutions using scenarios drawn from our case study. (C) 1999 Elsevier Scienc e B.V. All rights reserved.