An effective approach to collaborative knowledge creation in the manufacturing industry

This paper describes research carried out to investigate and address the problems associated with knowledge creation through collaboration between diverse stakeholder groups of a manufacturing company project. Collaboration is an emerging necessity for organisations and has been influenced by the evolving need for gathering segmented groups with diverse knowledge and experience in developing new solutions to support addressing complex problems in a domain. Use of new technologies, to some extent, assists interaction and collaboration between segregated stakeholders. This approach has been a feasible solution for real-Time communication in virtual environment, however, stakeholder boundaries influence the recognition of the problem-related factors affecting different stakeholder groups in a domain and results in conflicts of perspectives and ineffective interaction between stakeholder groups. A collaborative leadership approach was used in this project. Leading collaborative knowledge creation involves setting up an environment in which members of different stakeholder groups in a domain meet and collaboratively find solution to the problems that they could not find individually. Lack of effective and efficient leadership of knowledge creation in such environment could result in significant exchange of data rather than problem-centred knowledge. This paper describes the method called Effective Problem-Solving (Ep-s) which was developed, by the authors, as practical process of collaborative leadership for implementing successful collaborative knowledge creation in manufacturing industry.