Cross-Border E-Collaboration for New Product Development in the Automotive Industry

In highly globalized industries such as the automotive industry, product development is strongly dependent on e-collaboration tools that hold the potential to capitalize on specialized-knowledge across nations, organizations and professions. This paper focuses on the determinants and impacts of e-collaboration tools in geographically distributed product development teams. Preliminary results from an empirical study conducted among members of three new product development teams suggest that the determinants of the level of use of e-collaboration tools seem strongly biased towards human-related factors (language differences, training, professional background differences) and that the overall impact of these tools is positive but not significantly related to cost reductions.