A Prototype Method and Tool to Facilitate Knowledge Sharing in the New Product Development Process

摘要

New Product Development (NPD) plays a critical role in the success of manufacturingfirms. Activities in the product development process are dependent on the exchange ofknowledge among NPD project team members. Increasingly, many organisationsconsider effective knowledge sharing to be a source of competitive advantage.However, the sharing of knowledge is often inhibited in various ways.This doctoral research presents an exploratory case study conducted at amultinational physical goods manufacturer. This investigation uncovered three,empirically derived and theoretically informed, barriers to knowledge sharing. Theyhave been articulated as the lack of an explicit definition of information about theknowledge used and generated in the product development process, and the absence ofmechanisms to make this information accessible in a multilingual environment and todisseminate it to NPD project team members. Collectively, these barriers inhibit ashared understanding of product development process knowledge. Existing knowledgemanagement methodologies have focused on the capture of knowledge, rather thanproviding information about the knowledge and have not explicitly addressed issuesregarding knowledge sharing in a multilingual environment.This thesis reports a prototype method and tool to facilitate knowledge sharingthat addresses all three knowledge sharing barriers. Initially the research set out toidentify and classify new product development process knowledge and then sought todetermine what information about specific knowledge items is required by projectteams. Based on the exploratory case findings, an ontology has been developed thatformally defines information about this knowledge and allows it to be captured in aknowledge acquisition tool, thereby creating a knowledge base. A mechanism isprovided to permit language labels to be attached to concepts and relations in theontology, making it accessible to speakers of different languages. A dissemination toolallows the ontology and knowledge base to be viewed via a Web browser client.Essentially, the ontology and mechanisms facilitate a knowledge sharing capability.Some initial validation was conducted to better understand implementation issues andfuture deployment of the prototype method and tool in practice.