Experiences from Establishing Knowledge Management in a Joint Research Project

Joint research projects are create new knowledge and lessons learned from experience. A research project with several partners is a challenging environment for systematic reuse of knowledge and experience. Knowledge management is often considered overhead, with several tasks added to the workload of the project. This overhead can become overwhelming, since partners from academia and industry have different backgrounds, and may associate different goals and priorities with the project. Industry partners tend to follow strict security guidelines that hamper experience exchange. An extension of project duration is not possible in many publicly funded joint projects. In this paper, we describe our experiences from the initial phase of a major German joint research project with partners from academia and industry. We describe the applied techniques and the lessons learned during the first year the project. We derive conclusions and provide suggestions how to introduce knowledge and experience management in similar projects.