Complex organizational knowledge structures for new product development teams

摘要

When a new product development team faces challenges, such as the cross-functional knowledge conversion task, both simple and existing organizational structures are comprised of various management methods and knowledge characteristics, analogous to a fully armed military force. However, these features are not arranged in order of priority. Each step within the knowledge conversion process of new product development may not require such a full depot of management methods and keynotes. Therefore, this study adopted Bladder's perspective to examine the suitable organizational knowledge structure for cross-functional knowledge conversion within new product development teams. This study found that the continual steps of socialization, extemalization, combination, and internali-zation in the new product development team's knowledge conversion process were positively related to various organizational knowledge structures based on a survey of 107 Taiwanese high-technology small and medium-sized enterprises' new product development teams - not merely a simple structure for all steps. Thus, these results confirm that complex structures are required to perform knowledge conversion. Socialization requires knowledge characteristics from both the communication-intensive organization and the symbolic-analyst-dependent organization. Extemalization requires elements of knowledge from the communication-intensive organization, the symbolic-analyst-dependent organization, and knowl-edge-routinized organization. Combination requires features from the knowledge-routinized organization, and internalization requires characteristics from the expert-dependent organization. In addition, this study attempted to integrate the knowledge features from communication-intensive organization and symbolic-analyst-dependent organization structures for the socialization and extemalization stages. This effort concentrated on solving novel and irregular problems through a simplification of the complex organizational structures which make the new product development's knowledge conversion run smoother.