Product development in the manufacturing industry has been facing unprecedented challenges brought about by everchanging global and competitive market conditions as well as changing individual customer demands. As manufacturing enterprises become more specialized, they need to communicate and work concurrently on a large volume of product data covering their factories, sub-contractors as well as suppliers. The collaboration and cooperation between enterprises is changing from a supply chain based on material flow to a collaborative product development chain based on task flow. Computer network technologies, especially the Internet, have injected velocity into product development activities and enabled companies to shift their traditionally centralized product development philosophy to networked product development philosophy.This paper introduces a new paradigm called Internet-based collaborative product development chain (ICPDC) to answer the aforementioned needs of current product development. It connects users in geographically different locations to carry out product development activities simultaneously and collaboratively using a series of tools, including product management tools, workflow management tools, and project management tools. Some key aspects of the ICPDC, including its concept, collaboration mechanism, constituents and fashioning principle, are introduced in detail. Furthermore, a framework for the ICPDC based on a Brower/Server is proposed. Finally, a prototype is implemented using web services technology and .Net programming language to demonstrate the feasibility of the structure and the collaborative approach that has been developed.

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