This is a case study of cooperative development between a college and a corporation to manufacture a carton-filling machine. Specifically, a green cooperative development method was proposed that would match the college’s design capabilities with the manufacturing capacity of the enterprise. This college–enterprise cooperative development represents an extensive collaboration between industry and academia. This method integrates design for manufacturing (DFM) theory and the integrated computer aided manufacturing definition (IDEF) method to establish the IDEF0 (functional) model of manufacturing knowledge that supports the design process. The model clarifies the specific manufacturing knowledge that enterprises should provide at the conceptual design stage, preliminary design stage and detailed design stage. The forms of communication and timing of knowledge provision needed to optimize development planning and design decisions based on the manufacturing capacity of the enterprise were also determined. Through this method, the college–enterprise cooperative development project (in this case, involving a carton-filling machine) was accomplished with less time, fewer design modifications and fewer parts needing to be reworked. The results show that this method can greatly reduce the run-in period of both parties, improve the efficiency of cooperative development and reduce the cost and waste of prototyping.