Conference article

Moving away from offering just physical artifacts to becoming providers of functional products; or Product Service Systems (PSS); implies inevitable changes in the way engineering knowledge is identified and shared in a cross company environment. Capturing downstream knowledge assets and making them available to cross-functional teams becomes crucial to approach ill-defined problems in PSS design. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Web 2.0-based knowledge sharing technologies may be used to support the design of functional products. The article; drawing on data from several industrial development projects in various segments; introduces the concept of “lightweight technologies” as a means to lower the threshold related to the sharing of downstream engineering knowledge assets. The paper points out potential benefits and challenges related to the adoption of a lightweight approach and provides examples of how tools like wikis; blogs or social bookmarking may be used to support functional product engineers.

Product Service Systems; Functional Product Development; Knowledge Sharing; Engineering 2.0; Lightweight technologies; Cross-functional teams