Factors that drive success in collaborative product development

Collaborative product development (CPD) activities have become increasingly common to keep up with market demands, shorten development cycle times, and improve overall competitiveness. This study examines the success factors that affect CPD to investigate how hi-tech organizations align technical and managerial skills to achieve development process effectiveness. A monoview strategy using data from qualitative interviews, examines an engineering project in a CPD environment within the New Zealand context. The study identifies factors within four contexts - management, cross-functional teams, processes, and supporting tools - that interact with each other to achieve improved CPD performance and project outcome. Company managements aim to create an environment that enable information flow between cross-functional teams, integrate professional skills and talents with the product development process and adopt technology-mediated supporting tools to maximize productivity and achieve better innovation results through collaboration.