Knowledge-Sharing Strategies in Distributed Collaborative Product Development

Knowledge-sharing strategies are used across the industry as open innovation and distributed collaboration are becoming more popular to achieve technological competencies, faster time-to-market, competitiveness and growth. Sharing of knowledge can provide benefits to manufacturing and new product development (NPD) companies in improving their product quality and enhancing business potential. This paper examines the implementation of knowledge-sharing strategies in New Zealand aimed at bridging the physical locational issues to achieve collaborative benefits in NPD firms through an in-depth case study. The analysis of this only one, but interesting, case extends a holistic multi-mediation model by Pateli and Lioukas for the effect of functional involvement in a distributed collaborative product development environment. This study explores the external and internal knowledge transfer and how it affects early-stage, late-stage, and the overall product development process. Findings present a knowledge-sharing toolset that enhances innovation in all stages of product development overcoming the environmental factors to improve early and late-stage development through a two-way knowledge-transfer loop with distributed stakeholders. An encouraging management culture is found as key for transparent knowledge transfer across cross-functional teams. The organizational structure and management style play an important role for both external and internal distribution of knowledge.

Effort exertion and contract design in collaborative product development with fairness concern

Purpose This study aims to model collaborative product development (CPD) among a focal firm (FF) and a fairness-concerned external partner (EP). The model is used to explore the impact of fairness concerns on revenue distributing contract and innovation efforts. The study also examines the role of follow-up sales in product development decisions. Design/methodology/approach A sequential game-theoretic model is developed to analyze product development decisions between the two parties, where participants exert innovation efforts to promote the product value and a revenue-sharing contract is used to distribute the revenue. Findings Fairness concern of EP has significant impacts on decisions. FF has incentives to change the contract in that fairness concerns might decrease his profit. Conditions and results change when the contract is endogenously decided. First, FF tends to develop the product independently. Second, FF may share a smaller revenue fraction with EP, as FF relies more on his own efforts during CPD. Third, FF cannot benefit from fairness concerns, as his profit is not higher than that in the benchmark. Finally, the existence of follow-up sales does not change FF’s decision about whether to collaborate with EP. Originality/value This study incorporates fairness preference into CPD decisions. Besides, a new concept of fairness called “effort-related fairness” is proposed.

Literature review of quality attributes for collaborative product development

In collaborative product development, diverse stakeholders are involved in distributed engineering activities. This situation makes it difficult to ensure, manage, and improve the quality across company boundaries. Therefore, this work determines the characteristics of collaborative engineering which have an influence on the quality of distributed product development. Several interoperability frameworks were analyzed in order to get insights into key areas for collaboration design. Furthermore, a systematic literature review provided the best practices for improvement efforts. The derived quality attributes were condensed and adapted to collaborative product development in the four key areas of organization and processes, data/artifacts, information technology systems and infrastructure, and social factors. This enables product developers to examine their collaborative engineering environment and to identify room for improvement and to enhance quality. A case example of an engineering change order shows a collaborative data flow process, in which the quality attributes may indicate improvement measures.