perFECT interaction: Facilitating evaluation of collaborative technologies for user engagement in engineering innovation networks

Abstract

The swift economic change in contemporary experience has seen successful organisations seek to connect more rapidly and more effectively with others in the creation of new knowledge. The last decade has seen a growing interest in online networks as a formal and informal schema for transferring and generating knowledge within product development. These networks are rooted in the nature of knowledge creation as a socially embedded process. Collaborative technologies have been widely accepted and adopted as platforms facilitating innovation in the interactions of contemporary networks, and this paper seeks to develop an evaluation schema and employ it to examine how such interaction is facilitated through the medium of Web 2.0 technologies in an engineering network. The contribution of this research to theory and innovation technology practice will be to further the understanding of the impact of Web 2.0 technologies on engineering innovation networks.