The Role of Information Technology in Product Development: An Introduction - Information Technology and Product Development - page 8

offer more versatile decision support facilities capable of combining structured and
unstructured information in real time.
Further, an increasing number of firms (e.g., Boeing, IBM, GE, Microsoft)
rely on virtual product development teams to minimize their product development
costs and time-to-market (Boutellier, Gassman, Macho, & Roux, 1998; Dahan &
Hauser, 2001; Hameri & Nihtila, 1997; Ozer, 2000). The added focus on virtual
teams has raised several management issues including establishing IT-based sup-
port for virtual teams, developing trust in virtual team environments, structuring
of knowledge-management systems (e.g., Majchrzak, Rice, Malhotra, Nelson, &
Ba, 2000; Maznevski & Chudoba, 2000; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Malhotra,
Majchrzak, Carman, & Lott, 2001; Cramton, 2001).
At the same time, the nature and the extent of collaboration in product and ser-
vice innovation have undergone radical changes in recent years. Firms now seek
innovative ideas from a wide range of potential partners - customers, suppliers,
complementors, etc. For example, customers can contribute to innovation and value
creation activities including product conceptualization or ideation, product design
and development, product testing, product marketing and diffusion, and product
support through virtual customer environments (VCEs) (Nambisan, 2002). Recent
research (e.g., Dahan & Hauser, 2002; Nambisan & Nambisan, 2008; Prahalad &
Ramaswamy, 2003; Sawhney & Prandelli, 2000; Thomke & von Hippel, 2002) has
identified several interesting issues for future research in this area including moti-
vations for customer co-creation, customer co-creation experience, organizational
design choices that enhance the effectiveness of customer co-innovation. The same
holds true for collaborative innovation with other types of partners.
As such the need for IT-based support to collaborative innovation has become
more critical. The new IT-based systems that support such network-centric or
distributed innovation environments integrate a wide range of collaboration tools
(Dahan & Hauser, 2001; Nambisan & Sawhney, 2007). Furthermore, such virtual
collaboration systems have to cater to multiple partners who differ in their IT capa-
bilities, their need to access the project/product knowledge base, the nature of their
participation in NPD, and their regional/organizational culture. Thus, the IT-based
collaboration and communication systems used must be flexible and well integrated
with knowledge-management systems.
In sum, future research on IT and product/service development will need to adopt
a dual focus. On the one hand, it has to maintain the focus on the role of IT in
supporting project and process management. This is critical as newer types of IT
applications emerge in these areas and companies find it challenging to incorporate
those applications in their day-to-day product development practice. On the other
hand, future research will also need to initiate a focus on addressing the issues and
challenges related to newer models of collaborative innovation such as network-
centric innovation and open innovation. Maintaining such a dual focus in research
on IT and product development will be crucial to be able to offer valuable insights on
diverse types of IT-enabled product development models and activities. As described
in the following section, this topic will attempt to layout a research agenda that
would maintain such a dual focus and advance research on both fronts.