Teleworking and new product development

Purpose – To develop a model that assess the feasibility to telework new product activities. Design/methodology/approach – Literature review of innovation and telework to find criteria relevant to use telework in new product development activities. Findings – The first stage of the model assess the feasibility of telework in new product development activities according to four criteria: importance of teamwork, need of using equipment and laboratories, intensity of data processing, and frequency of meetings. The second stage assess the level of knowledge in each new product development activity. The model analyses the knowledge tasks according to four basic knowledge processes: generation, codification, storage and transfer. The third and final stage assess the distribution of productive work time of new product development employees to obtain groups of new product development activities suitable to be teleworked. Research limitations/implications – Firstly, to enlarge the taxonomy of variables that define each one of the four basic knowledge management processes included in the model. Secondly, to test empirically with case studies and surveys the working time requirements of knowledge tasks. The number of knowledge tasks included in the analysis could also be enlarged in future studies. Practical implications – The framework provides an aid to research and managerial application of telework in new product development activities. The methodology developed in the paper may be useful for preliminary analysis of teleworking implementation projects. It may also help to the adoption of information and communication technologies for the company's new development processes. Originality/value – The adoption of teleworking among knowledge processes arises the question whether teleworking may be used in the company's innovation activities. The methodology proposed in the paper wants to contribute to this topic by developing a framework adapted to the different activities in the new product development process.