Knowledge Management Systems Contributions to New Product Development : Lessons from a Case Study in the Aerospace Industry (in French)

While several studies on Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) have focused on their effects on knowledge reuse and collaboration, the objective of this article is to provide a more throughout assessment of the contribution of KMS to New Product Development (NPD). Through an analysis of an aerospace company’s KM initiative, we investigate how KMS support NPD processes and the challenges the organization is actually facing to enhance and achieve greater competitive advantage from its initiative. Our findings based on a series of 25 interviews with the company managers and key users imply that this company’s efforts to capitalize and codify knowledge related to its entire new product development (NPD) process resulted mainly in a significant time-to-market reduction and indirectly contributed to the increase of new products developed