Knowledge Sharing Barriers in New Product Development

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to analyze the factors influencing the success or failure of the integration between two organizations after a corporate merger or acquisition. The success for the acquiring firm and its stakeholders depends a lot on the efficiency of the integration process. This research presents an exploratory case study conducted at 8 Albanian merged companies and provides more insight in the factors relating to the organizational integration between two NPD departments. This investigation also reveals a discontinuity in knowledge sharing and uncovers three, empirically derived and theoretically informed, barriers to knowledge sharing in a multilingual post-merger environment. Many organizations consider effective knowledge sharing to be a source of competitive advantage after the mergers occur. However, the sharing of knowledge is often inhibited in various ways. They have been articulated as the lack of an explicit definition of information about the knowledge used and generated in the product development process, and the absence of mechanisms to make this information accessible in a multilingual environment and to disseminate it to NPD project team members. Collectively, these barriers inhibit a shared understanding of product development process knowledge. Existing knowledge management methodologies have focused on the capture of knowledge, rather than providing information about the knowledge and have not explicitly addressed issues regarding knowledge sharing in a multilingual environment after mergers occur in a developing country setting.