The aim of the paper is to discuss the rising potential of social software to increase the knowledge management capabilities of virtual product development teams. It presents six fundamental transitions, elaborated from the empirical findings, which justify the rise of a more bottom-up, social creation and sharing of engineering knowledge in the virtual organisation. The study suggests that traditional engineering knowledge management approaches alone are not sufficient to support development activities in the virtual organisation, and that such teams display an increasing demand for social, comparatively lightweight and remixable platforms for bottom-up, social creation and sharing of knowledge.
['Marco Bertoni', 'Andreas Larsson', 'Åsa Ericson', 'Koteshwar Chirumalla', 'Tobias Larsson', 'Ola Isaksson', 'Dave Randall']
The rise of social product development