A new paradigm for virtual knowledge sharing in product development based on emergent social software platforms

Abstract

The UK Government considers its Aerospace Industry a remarkable success story, enjoying a global market share of 17% in 2015. The capture, management and sharing of employee knowledge is seen as vital if the industry is to remain highly innovative and retain its pre-eminent position internationally.Aerospace manufacturers, such as BAE Systems, often have to re-engineer business processes routinely to ensure their survival. Knowledge sharing in the industry is seen as challenging due to the dispersed nature of its operations and multi-tier supply chains. This paper, through a five-year participantobservation study at the World's second largest aerospace and defence organisation, BAE Systems, proposes a new paradigm for virtual knowledge sharing in dispersed aerospace product development based on emergent social software platforms such as Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The developed framework and methodologies are applied to the bespoke BAE Systems' engineering lifecycle process to validate its effectiveness with results indicating that Enterprise 2.0 technologies offer a more openlyinnovative environment in which employees may share and interact with knowledge more effectively and easily across geographical and functional boundaries, compared with conventional engineering information systems.

Guest Editorial: Open Innovation and Social Product Development

“…However, researchers [3] concur that this closed approach to IPD has become obsolete due to various factors, including but not limited to: first, the availability of external knowledge generated through a variety of other sources, including universities and social media channels, and second, the availability of venture capital and crowdfunding mechanisms, which have created start-up companies that acquire high-quality talent in direct competition with manufacturers. Similarly, collaborative web-based technologies have facilitated the generation of collective intelligence and collaborative innovation, with manufacturers realizing that such tools allow designers and engineers to better connect with colleagues and external actors while capturing a wider base of typically informal or highly dispersed views and information [4]. More recently, manufacturers have begun to outsource their innovation efforts and work collaboratively using new forms of R&D laboratories operating in partnership with governments, educational institutions, and other firms from the same or different industries.…”

Investigation on industrial dataspace for advanced machining workshops: enabling machining operations control with domain knowledge and application case studies

“…Domain knowledge can make machining operations more intelligent. Many expert systems have succeeded in describing knowledge with specific formats, storing them in the structural database, and sharing them with others for reusing (Gao and Nee 2017;Evans et al 2017;Zammit et al 2017;He and Jiang 2019). Besides, the knowledge graph, as one of the state-of-the-art technologies, is becoming a popular way to express large-scale knowledge (Nickel et al 2016).…”

Process Knowledge Recommendation System for Mechanical Product Design

“…Especially, under the perspective of product life-cycle, many researchers focus on how to use the knowledge service methods in collaborative product development teams [8,9,10,11] and new product development [12,13,14,15]. For the rest stages of product life-cycle, the research concern of knowledge sharing framework and method are focused on socialization mechanisms product development teams [16,17,18], product-service system development (PSS) [19,20], product supply chain management [21,22,23] and outsourcing projects of software product [24].…”