An Analysis on the Product Development Process of an In-House Research and Development Center Using Product Genealogy Based on an Emergent Business Filed Research: A Case Study on the Generation, the Transformation and the Succession of Knowledge in Practice

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the process of the generation, transformation, and succession of knowledge in practice using product genealogy. We investigated the development process of product X, which was developed over 27 years at a research and development (R&D) center of company α. We adopted emergent business field research, in which a practitioner becomes a researcher and investigates his own business field. We also analyzed using the conceptual frameworks of communities of practice and boundary objects. As a result, we found the succeeded explicit knowledge and the knowledge remained in practice and presented the characteristics of knowledge in practice during the development process related to product X.