Social Networking and Product Development

23 Jul, 2009 By: Tom Shoemaker

Web 2.0 technologies bring advantages, disadvantages, and applicability to the product engineering processes.

Are Web 2.0 tools appropriate for use in product-development settings? Raise your hand if you say "Yes." How about "No way"? Lastly, is there anyone who believes "It depends"? My bet is that mass opinion resides with that third option. Social computing tools certainly offer great promise, but their potential use within product organizations is not without risk.

The Upside Companies can realize tremendous gains by incorporating social computing technologies — an initiative that product-development software company PTC has termed social product development.

A key value of social product development is that it allows engineers, project managers, and other product-development professionals to reach out to a broader network to gain knowledge and form new interest groups or communities.

Three communities participate in social product development: corporation, user, and community.

Each of the three communities that participate in social product development can be defined by its activities.

For example, an engineer might start by creating an online profile indicating education background, specialties, critical project successes, and willingness to connect with other engineers about specific topics such as product validation and nondestructive testing. At some point, another design engineer might run into a design problem, conduct an enterprise profile search for design engineers with experience in particular types of nondestructive testing, then find and seek assistance from the first design engineer.

A design engineer works to solve a problem with the assistance of a social network organization. This example shows how social product development works within an organization.

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About the Author: Tom Shoemaker

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