Abstract:
New Product Development (NPD) plays a critical role in the success of manufacturing
firms. Activities in the product development process are dependent on the exchange of
knowledge among NPD project team members. Increasingly, many organisations
consider 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 a
multinational physical goods manufacturer. This investigation uncovered three,
empirically derived and theoretically informed, barriers to knowledge sharing. They
have been articulated as the lack of an explicit definition of information about the
knowledge used and generated in the product development process, and the absence of
mechanisms to make this information accessible in a multilingual environment and to
disseminate it to NPD project team members. Collectively, these barriers inhibit a
shared understanding of product development process knowledge. Existing knowledge
management methodologies have focused on the capture of knowledge, rather than
providing information about the knowledge and have not explicitly addressed issues
regarding knowledge sharing in a multilingual environment.
This thesis reports a prototype method and tool to facilitate knowledge sharing
that addresses all three knowledge sharing barriers. Initially the research set out to
identify and classify new product development process knowledge and then sought to
determine what information about specific knowledge items is required by project
teams. Based on the exploratory case findings, an ontology has been developed that
formally defines information about this knowledge and allows it to be captured in a
knowledge acquisition tool, thereby creating a knowledge base. A mechanism is
provided to permit language labels to be attached to concepts and relations in the
ontology, making it accessible to speakers of different languages. A dissemination tool
allows 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 and
future deployment of the prototype method and tool in practice.
