5. Understanding Collaboration in Knowledge Processes in Indian Industry

Collaborative design supports quality innovation in reduced cost and time to market; this is critical to sustain organizations within the current competitive product development landscape. Understanding the knowledge processes that occur through collaboration among stakeholders in designing should help industry assess the quality of its collaboration and knowledge processes. Existing models for understanding knowledge processes during collaboration are inadequate in describing significant details of these processes; importantly, they do not stress the centrality of interactions in processing knowledge. A collaborative model called Knowledge-Requirements-Interactions-Tasks, or “KRIT,” is proposed to help understand how collaborative knowledge processing takes place through interaction among stakeholders in product development. Also, an Influence model has been proposed to assess the levels of satisfaction of the four elements in the KRIT model. Indicators for satisfaction of knowledge, requirements, interactions, and tasks of a solution are proposed using industrial data collected on collaboration. These models should inform development of support to assist knowledge processing to improve work performance of stakeholders and consequent quality of outcomes.