Distributed Product Development in Virtual Communities

Organizations are increasingly forced to manage and coordinate their product and service development processes, to deliver their products and services as fast as possible, and to involve employees, customers, suppliers, and partners seamlessly in different stages of the processes. These processes have to consider that their participants are more and more on the move or distributed while they are working. Expertise needs to be shared across locations and different mobile devices. This paper defines a framework for distributed and mobile collaboration, defines a set of requirements for virtual communities, and discusses a mobile teamwork support software architecture that has been developed in the EU-project MOTION. The framework together with the architecture enables to enhance current collaboration approaches to include the dimension of mobile participants and virtual communities for distributed product development.