Factors that drive success in collaborative product development

Abstract

Collaborative product development (CPD) activities have become increasingly common to keep up with market demands, shorten development cycle times, and improve overall competitiveness. This study examines the success factors that affect CPD to investigate how hi-tech organizations align technical and managerial skills to achieve development process effectiveness. A monoview strategy using data from qualitative interviews, examines an engineering project in a CPD environment within the New Zealand context. The study identifies factors within four contexts -management, cross-functional teams, processes, and supporting tools -that interact with each other to achieve improved CPD performance and project outcome. Company managements aim to create an environment that enable information flow between cross-functional teams, integrate professional skills and talents with the product development process and adopt technology-mediated supporting tools to maximize productivity and achieve better innovation results through collaboration.

Knowledge transferring and conversion in the early stage of collaborative product design by entrepreneurial teams

“…transferring/sharing knowledge with the aim to design innovative products (Audretsch et al , 2020; Kuratko et al , 2020; Belitski et al , 2021). In PD, collaboration can provide advantages in speed and resources savings through the effective and efficient transferring and sharing of knowledge (Mathrani et al , 2011; Mathrani and Edwards, 2020). User/customer knowledge is an irreplaceable resource in PD (Sawhney et al , 2003; Su et al , 2006).…”

Knowledge-Sharing Strategies in Distributed Collaborative Product Development

“…Alpha's open culture allowed knowledge transfer including inputs from external environmental factors such as market players, research institutions and intermediaries to be free, transparent and with a two-way flow at all levels of the company. Their strategy followed many collaboration drivers introduced by Mathrani, Mathrani and Liu [21], however the three main factors identified for knowledge-sharing were cross-functional team culture, management involvement, and use of supporting tools. The diverse range of managers involved in decision making allowed multiple viewpoints throughout the product development process.…”

“…Collaboration between companies provides opportunities for competitive product development with extra effort and communication to be upheld for successful collaboration. Mathrani, et al [21] proposed a critical success factor (CSF) framework for collaborative product development shown in Figure 1, which suggests four different contexts (management, team, process and supporting tools) with each having individual constructs that influence the outcome of the process. These constructs are vital in ensuring that an environment of information flow is thriving in cross-functional teams.…”