Interaction Patterns in Collaborative Product Development (CPD)

Purpose – This article endeavors to provide a potential framework for analysing knowledge transfer in CPD through social network analysis (SNA). Design/methodology/approach – The survey is used to describe how the supplier and buyer worked together to transfer knowledge for developing product in practice. Findings – The results show that to enable collaboration, the effective synergy and communication and transfer of knowledge are important. In the context of CPD, this refers to the capability of individual project members to broker and the intermediate relationship between supplier and buyer by assuring the effective information and knowledge transfer and collaboration between team members. A further important issue is that the communication and knowledge transfer is different between different roles. Research limitation/implication – This study is conducted in high-tech companies. However, it could serve as the basic for conducting similar further studies in a large amount of companies and more research into a board spectrum of companies than just the high-tech.