Knowledge integration is one of the most sought-after concepts in the present volatile market.

In every function of an organisation, knowledge integration plays crucial role. Considering all

its contribution to a modern organisation, we can understand the important role it plays in the

New Product Development processes of an organisation. Apart from new product

development, the importance of knowledge integration is also emphasized in the field of

Supply Chain Management. The incapability of the market to coordinate knowledge transfer

across the individual firms has created the motivation for the giant firms to undergo various

processes to build upstream and downstream knowledge architecture. This paper proposes

that knowledge integration can be separated into two different kinds of mechanisms, that of

knowledge sharing and knowledge enrichment. The model developed in this paper has

defined dependent variables based on knowledge based view of the firm and knowledge

integration literature. The independent variables are defined based on the capabilities and

NPD literature. The proposed Hypothesis are:

H1a: Knowledge sharing with suppliers is positively associated with the design effectiveness

of a focal firm with respect to the new product development

H1b: Knowledge sharing with suppliers is positively associated with the manufacturing

capability of a focal firm with respect to the new product development

After the study has been made based on the above hypothesis and few other hypothesis, the

following results are seen. The discussion bellow includes the process as well as the outcome

of the study.

The study offers several contributions to the knowledge management, new product

development and collaborative network literatures. First, our results demonstrate that

knowledge stock ‘bundles’ are important predictors of fit to firm’s design and manufacturing

capability in new product development projects. As this constellation of firms constitute a

collaborative network all marching towards a common focus of a successful product launch,

the implication is on the selection of knowledge stock that are different on the supply side

from the knowledge stock on the customer side. The fact that this result is a testimony of

what happens in a variety of NPD projects across a wide set of products and across a wider

variety of firms is a distinct contribution of this research to a multitude of disciplines.

Second, our results corroborate and extend previous findings that suggest that firm

capabilities in terms of product concept effectiveness and process performance matter in NPD

projects. Accordingly, the differential effects of knowledge stock on both sides of the

collaborative network are revealing. It is also examined the concomitant effects of knowledge

side of both sides of the collaborative network and conclude the dominant and pervasive

effect of supply side knowledge stock even after accounting for the effects of the customer

side of knowledge stock. Finally, our results offer actionable guidelines for managers in

selecting and deploying appropriate knowledge stock practices depending on the type of

performance or capability measure, that they are interested in enhancing and the type of

product, size of project and the product maturity. A holistic view of developing an enterprise

wide knowledge integration schema that captures knowledge stock from all aspects of the

collaborative network can be a key resource in a firm’s arsenal of knowledge management

repository. Such a repository will ensure that knowledge capital that emerges from prior

experience, from benchmarking and from current projects would further enrich the utility of

this valuable resource. In this manner, knowledge stock becomes persistent within the

company even after some of the key original developers would have left. In conclusion, we

offer some limitations of this work and offer suggestions for future research. First, we have

not considered the structure of the underlying networks, both on the upstream side and

downstream side. Should managers use different strategies if the networks configured

differently? It is conceivable to think that if a focal firm has a decentralised upstream supply

network and a densely connected downstream network, it may need to tweak its knowledge

sharing and enrichment mechanisms from the ones suggested in this paper. It is already

shown that network structures may have significant ramifications on how firms manage

information flow in networks. Second, extending knowledge enrichment and sharing in

media and social networks (from the customer side) would be a rich area for research.

Automotive companies like Ford have already started to use blogs for knowledge enrichment

on the customer side. Lastly, future studies should investigate the four dimensions of

knowledge creation within the context of the extended collaborative network. In this paper,

we have taken the first step towards establishing the basic mechanism of developing

enterprise wide knowledge sharing and enrichment for improving core capabilities and

improving NPD performance.

Article Taken from:

A holistic view of knowledge integration in collaborative supply chains

Jayanth Jayarama and Surya Pathak