Retracted: Knowledge Sourcing and Knowledge Reuse in the Virtual Product Prototyping: An Exploratory Study in a Large Automotive Supplier of R&D

• Author: Salma Alguezaui,Raffaele Filieri
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/kpm.1455
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016

RETRACTED

■Research Article

Knowledge Sourcing and Knowledge

Reuse in the Virtual Product Prototyping:

An Exploratory Study in a Large

Automotive Supplier of R&D

Raffaele Filieri

1

*and Salma Alguezaui

2

1

Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom

2

Department of Business Engineering, Università del Salento, via per Monteroni s.n. Lecce, Italy

The capacity of organizations to share knowledge is seen as a source of competitive advantage in many industries.

Knowledge sourcing and knowledge reuse have been indicated as important enablers of organizational efficiency

and innovation performance. Although firms may own valuable knowledge, the presence of barriers to knowledge

sourcing and reuse may hinder the exploitation of such knowledge. The present study explores the barriers to knowl-

edge sourcing and reuse and their implications within the virtual product prototyping stage of new products develop-

ment. The study is based on 24 interviews with R&D employees of a large supplier of R&D in the automotive sector.

Results demonstrate that the low operational quality of a repository may hinder knowledge sourcing; therefore, people

prefer to source knowledge from other colleagues. Additionally, the inefficiencies in knowledge sourcing from a repos-

itory, the low quality of the codified knowledge, and its complexity affect the reuse of existing knowledge. This study

reveals that knowledge sourcing and knowledge reuse are important knowledge managementprocesses in the product

prototyping and that inefficiencies in these two processes may negatively affect the time performance in the new prod-

uct prototyping process. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

The achievementof competitive advantagesurges or-

ganizationsto manage knowledge,namely to acquire,

integrate,store, share and applyincreasing amount of

knowledge (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990; Grant, 1996,

Davenport and Prusak, 1998; Kankanhalli et al.,

2005; Watson and Hewett, 2006). Many firms recog-

nize knowledge management as a key success factor

of their business (Ofek and Sarvary, 2001) and are in-

creasingly improving their knowledge management

activities in an attempt to make people access the

right knowledge at the right time in the right format

to increase organizational performance (O’Dell and

Grayson, 1998; Gray and Meister, 2006).

Research has demonstrated that the reuse of

knowledge is critical to a firm’s performance be-

cause it affects its organizational effectiveness and

can result in time saving (O’Dell and Grayson,

1998; Markus, 2001; Dixon, 2002; Haas and Hansen,

2007). However, no research has investigated the

importance and the role of knowledge sourcing

(KS) and knowledge reuse (KR) within the virtual

product prototype development (VPPD). The VPPD

is a stage of the new product development process

(NPD) where R&D people from different areas of a

company work together in a virtual environment

for the solutions of problems that emerge during

the assembly of the vehicle parts. The VPPD is a

knowledge-intensive process since R&D people

generate vast amounts of knowledge that is stored

in knowledge repositories, manuals, technical re-

ports, and so forth (Corallo et al., 2009). Since most

of NPD projects are not ‘clean-sheet’efforts, rather

incremental redesigns of existing products (Swink,

2003), R&D people often retrieve and reuse existing

knowledge to solve recurring problems in the de-

sign of new products. For instance, it is valuable to

investigate the role of knowledge sourcing and

reuse from a repository within the product

prototyping process.

*Correspondence to: Raffaela Filieri, Newcastle Business School,

Northumbria University, City Campus East 1, Newcastle Upon

Tyne, NE18ST, United Kingdom.

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

Knowledge and Process Management

Volume 23 Number 4 pp E1–E14 (2016)

Published online 7 April 2015 in Wiley Online Library

(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/kpm.1455

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.