Antecedents of Knowledge Sourcing and Reuse from a Knowledge Repository in the Virtual Product Prototyping: The Role of Knowledge and System Quality Dimensions

• Published date: 01 April 2016
• Author: Robert Willison,Raffaele Filieri
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/kpm.1512
• Date: 01 April 2016

■Research Article

Antecedents of Knowledge Sourcing and

Reuse from a Knowledge Repository in

the Virtual Product Prototyping: The Role

of Knowledge and System Quality

Dimensions

Raffaele Filieri*and Robert Willison

Newcastle University Business School Newcastle University, United Kingdom

Knowledge has been identified as one of the most critical resources for achieving innovation and competitive advan-

tage. Knowledge management systems (KMS) are, therefore, being adopted by companies to enhance knowledge

management (KM) processes and innovation. Because most of new products projects are not “clean-sheet”efforts,

rather incremental redesigns of existing products, R&D people often retrieve and reuse existing knowledge to solve

recurring problems in the prototyping of new products. Thus, knowledge sourcing and reuse are particularly impor-

tant in this product development process. In the present research we investigated the antecedents of knowledge sourc-

ing and knowledge reuse from an electronic repository. Predictions were tested in the context of the virtual vehicle

prototyping process with data from 121 respondents of a large European Automotive supplier of R&D. Results pro-

vide support that knowledge accuracy, knowledge format, and knowledge completeness are strong predictors of

knowledge reuse. While system integration, flexibility, and response time are considered strong determinants of

knowledge sourcing in KMS. The study develops and tests a new model for measuring KMS success in the context

of virtual product prototyping. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

Achieving competitive advantage urges firms to

acquire, integrate, store, share, and apply increasing

amounts of knowledge (Grant, 1996; Davenport and

Prusak, 1998). Businesses during the product devel-

opment process develop and archive huge amounts

of knowledge on product design, product anoma-

lies, anomalies solution, best practices, and the like.

The capability of organisation to enable a rapid and

effective sourcing of such knowledge is of critical

importance in the product prototype development

process. Companies are, therefore, adopting knowl-

edge management systems (KMS) to boost knowl-

edge management processes in sectors such as the

automotive industry. However, research has found

that the introduction of KMS in organisations often

fails (Malhotra, 2004; Chua and Lam, 2005). The rea-

sons for this failure include behavioural and social

factors related to their adoption (Malhotra, 2004),

or to technological, cultural, knowledge content,

and project management aspects related to KMS im-

plementation (Chua and Lam, 2005).

The present studyattempts to identify the determi-

nants of KMS success focusing on knowledge man-

agement processes post-KMS implementation in the

context of the new product development process. Be-

cause most of NPD projects are not “clean-sheet”ef-

forts, rather incremental redesigns of existing

products (Chandrasegaran et al., 2013), R&D people

often source and reuse existing knowledge to solve

recurring problems in the design of new products

(Filieri and Alguezaui,2015). The reuse of existingde-

sign knowledgeis the key to realise rapid product de-

sign (Lu et al., 2011). Research has measured IS

success in termsof the system capacity to foster users’

use (and intention to use) and satisfaction with the

*Correspondence to: Raffaele Filieri, Newcastle University Busi-

ness School Newcastle University 5 Barrack Rd, Newcastle upon

Tyne NE1 4SE, United Kingdom.

E-mail: raffaele.filieri@ncl.ac.uk

Knowledge and Process Management

Volume 23 Number 2 pp 147–160 (2016)

Published online in Wiley Online Library

(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/kpm.1512

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.