Title: The rise of social product development

Authors: Marco Bertoni; Andreas Larsson; Åsa Ericson; Koteshwar Chirumalla; Tobias Larsson; Ola Isaksson; Dave Randall

Addresses: Division of Innovation and Design, Luleå University of Technology, SE-97187 Luleå, Sweden. ' Department of Design Sciences, Faculty of Engineering, Lund University, P.O. Box 118, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden. ' Division of Innovation and Design, Luleå University of Technology, SE-97187 Luleå, Sweden. ' Division of Innovation and Design, Luleå University of Technology, SE-97187 Luleå, Sweden. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, SE-371 79 Karlskrona, Sweden. ' Volvo Aero Senior Specialist Product Development, Dept 9040, PD Quality, Volvo Aero Corporation, SE-461 81 Trollhättan, Sweden. ' Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Manton building 405, Manchester, UK

Abstract: The aim of the paper is to discuss the rising potential of social software to increase the knowledge management capabilities of virtual product development teams. It presents six fundamental transitions, elaborated from the empirical findings, which justify the rise of a more bottom-up, social creation and sharing of engineering knowledge in the virtual organisation. The study suggests that traditional engineering knowledge management approaches alone are not sufficient to support development activities in the virtual organisation, and that such teams display an increasing demand for social, comparatively lightweight and remixable platforms for bottom-up, social creation and sharing of knowledge.

Keywords: social product development; social software; engineering knowledge management; virtual organisations; Engineering 2.0; lightweight knowledge sharing; remixable platforms.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2012.048346

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2012 Vol.11 No.2, pp.188 - 207

Published online: 16 Aug 2014 *

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