A design of knowledge management tool for supporting product development

New Product Development (NPD) is one of the most important activities for companies. The NPD activities get to depend on knowledge more and more. Therefore, Knowledge Management (KM) has become a key issue and a hot topic in the fields of NPD researches. This paper proposes a new design of an effective NPD-support KM tool for facilitating the knowledge sharing and acquisition among collaborative NPD team members. The KM tool mainly contains two channels for knowledge acquisition: knowledge query and knowledge recommendation. The former one is the basic function for all types of KM tools, and also acts as the basis for the latter one. This paper proposes two types of knowledge recommendation ways: one is a vector-based way; the other is a phrase-based way. Key techniques for implementing the KM tool are elaborated. A demo example is also illustrated to show the functions of the proposed KM tool.