Information Technology as Knowledge Management Enabler in Product Development - An Empirical Evidence

Product development is a knowledge intensive process. It is widely recognized as a mechanism that produces firms to learn, to enter new technological areas, and to deal more effectively with market uncertainty. Since technology management has become ingrained within the field of knowledge management, product development has been viewed and studied from a knowledge management perspective. In this context, this study focuses on a specific knowledge management initiative, information technology (IT). It empirically explores how IT influences on knowledge based capabilities of product development - specifically knowledge exploitation and exploration. With this aim, we introduce a typology of IT configurations based on two main dimensions: the divergent and the convergent dimensions. The results show that the product development can be categorized in three IT configurations. Specially, our results provide statistically differences in terms of knowledge exploitation and show the advantages of a combination of the two dimensions of IT