Knowledge Sharing Across Boundaries: Web 2.0 and Product-Service System Development

In recent years there has been a growing interest among product development organizations to capitalize on engineering knowledge as their core competitive advantage for innovation. Capturing, storing, retrieval, sharing and reusing of engineering knowledge from a wide range of enterprise memory systems have become crucial activities of knowledge management practice in competitive organizations. In light of a changing and dynamic enterprise definition, including a move towards Product-Service System (PSS) development, this paper discusses some of the limitations of current enterprise systems in reusing engineering knowledge across functional and corporate boundaries. Further, the paper illustrates how Web 2.0-based collaborative technologies can leverage cross-functional knowledge for new PSS development projects through an open, bottom-up, and collective sense-making approach to knowledge management.