Knowledge Driven Product Development

Purpose and goal

The purpose of this project is to identify appropriate and adapted principles and methods that can help reduce knowledge waste in complex product development organizations. ´Lean´ in general aims to reduce and minimize waste of important resources. When it comes to large complex product development organizations, this waste is mostly related to the risk of wasting the resource ´knowledge´, i.e. knowledge waste. The project shows that individuals rely on, depending on the context, the following channels for knowledge dissemination: the document channel and the individual channel.

Results and expected effects

The goal of this project was to identify principles for the reduction of knowledge waste. The identified principles can be summarized into four categories. These involve the importance of having a clear purpose and identified reader of documentation. Also, knowledge is context dependant which makes central document repositories difficult; consequently, companies are not satisfied with how these currently work. A final observation made is that it seems common to change channel for knowledge transfer depending on what kind situation the individual finds himself in.

Approach and implementation

The project is based on 35 interviews divided among four companies: 9 at RUAG Space, 9 at Scania, 9 at SAAB Electronic Defense Systems and 8 at SAAB Aeronautics. The respondents represents three types of roles in the organization; 10 project leaders (and sub-project leaders), 8 line managers, on middle and high level, and 17 design engineers and technical specialists. These clusters have been of high importance to the project since the roles have different responsibilities and hence, expected to have different views and needs on/off knowledge dissemination in the organization.