Diana Völz

A contribution to engineering data sharing in discipline spanning global environments

In any product development process, team collaboration is a key to success. Especially, multidisciplinary and global teamwork is vital in finding a comprehensive solution in product development. But inherent gaps between the participating disciplines and cultures cause disputes and misunderstandings when collaborating. This paper shows the challenges in interdisciplinary and intercultural teamwork, which have to be overcome in order to advance an integrated product development process. The purpose of this research is to improve mutual accommodation in multidisciplinary and international teamwork with the support of modern information technology and technical product documentation.

Knowledge Integration in Global Engineering

In the globalised economy, organisational structures and methods used in product development have changed. Companies and organisations have responded by reengineering involved processes, increasing the use of information and communication technologies. Although not new, innovative concepts are required to fully support the resulting distributed virtual product development process. Modern information systems provide the access to information as well as communication, but actual software tools do not integrate the changing circumstances, arising from working in an intercultural field. Global Engineering can create problems of misunderstandings in the product development process leading to a possible lack of information as well as knowledge circulation. Knowledge Integration in collaboration supports successful communication and cooperation. It also supports finding common grounds, processes, and project language. The aim of this paper is to advance knowledge integration in product development to tackle the new challenges in Global Engineering.

Balancing trust and knowledge protection in inter-organisational product design collaboration

Apart from rules, regulations and technical support to protect crucial product design information and knowledge, trust can be a decisive factor for the success or failure of interorganisational product development cooperation. This paper shows the correlation between knowledge protection and trust. Product development cooperations success depends on information sharing in between the team. Hence, the question concerning the level of knowledge protection is usually a question about the level of trust, too. Finally, the level of trust should then be included into existing product development methods to balance teams; trust in cooperation and to protect development data from misuse.