Knowledge management for new product development meetings: The roles of information technology in shared knowledge creation

The research that is presented in this document investigated the nature of collective knowledge creation and sharing, and the roles that information technology support can play in those activities. The research consisted of three field-based phases. In the pilot phase, the general research area and research questions were established. The next phase culminated in five initial research findings, refined research questions, and the choice of new product development as the research context. New product development was used as the context for the research because of its strategic importance, the increasing pressures to accelerate it, and the challenges in improving it. In the final phase, the theory of communities of practice was selected for the research. This theory was used as a basis for two models that were subsequently tested at two technology intensive companies. Data was collected through interviews in the pilot phase, and through a combination of interviews and questionnaires in later phases. The questionnaire data was analyzed using Partial Least Squares.;The research yielded a number of key conclusions. Teams of people doing knowledge intensive work such as new product development will benefit from acting as a community of practice by increasing levels of participation and reification. Such teams will create and share knowledge more rapidly, and will at the same time achieve higher quality of output. The study showed that documentation plays an important role in the creation and sharing of knowledge. In the research a distinction was made between formal and informal meetings, and it was found that for the different types of meetings key findings were different. For instance, for informal meetings, documentation had a negative relationship with participation.;Information technology support was shown to be important for shared knowledge creation in teams. Such support can be directed at interactions that take place during meetings (participation) as well as at the documentation and storage of information and knowledge around meetings (reification). The findings from the research suggest that information technology is currently more important for participation than for documentation reification, and more important for formal meetings than for informal meetings. New developments in information technologies are expected to change the role that technologies play in shared knowledge creation.;The study contributed to the field by operationalizing important concepts from the theory of communities of practice, and by extending and testing the theory. Further research is needed to test the generalizability of the findings to other organizations and different types of teams. In particular, it will be important to use the findings to identify ways in which virtual teams, these members do not meet face to face, can act as communities.