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To proactively assist engineers in finding and reusing massive design lesson-learned knowledge (DLK), knowledge recommendation has become a key technology of knowledge management. However, in collaborative product design, complex multitask context information disrupts the perception of engineers' knowledge needs for every single task. In this situation, traditional knowledge recommendation approach is prone to provide a mixed DLK recommendation list, thus resulting in a lack of pertinence and low accuracy. Facing these challenges, scarcely any reports on context-aware knowledge recommendation in the multitask environment of collaborative product design. Aiming to fill this gap, a multitask context-aware DLK recommendation approach is proposed to assist collaborative product design in a smarter manner. The mutual interference of context information from different tasks is addressed by preprocessing works, multitask knowledge need awareness, DLK recommendation engine, respectively. Therefore, the proposed approach not only effectively acquires engineers' knowledge needs from different task contexts and pertinently provides the corresponding DLK recommendation list for each task but also guarantees the accuracy of DLK recommendation in multitask context of collaborative product design. To validate the proposed approach, a DLK recommendation system is implemented in a shipbuilding scenario, and some comparative experiments are carried out. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms conventional approaches in the aspects of effectiveness and performance. Therefore, it opens up a promising way to help engineers reuse needed DLK in collaborative product design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rapid proliferation of new product offerings, fast changing environments and shortened product life cycles, firms are being compelled to adopt a collaborative product development (CPD) approach to integrate key functions and stages of new product development in intrafirm and interfirm. An efficient CPD must rely on collaborative information systems (IS) to facilitate and support collaboration processes. Successful implementation of IS to fit the task must be recognized. Heavyweight-product managers (HPMs) who have sufficient authority to make significant decisions affecting the operation of the collaborative IS features and has gained significant importance Based on the task–technology fit model and by using CPD data collected from a survey of 205 companies, hypotheses regarding the role of HPMs and collaborative IS in enhancing collaborative product development were empirically tested. The results indicate that HPMs have a significant impact on the fitness of IS-to-task and computer utilization, and ultimately significant positive effect on product quality, as well as a reduction in design changes, cycle time and cost. The HPM seems to be an important exogenous construct affecting the relationships among the fitness of IS-to-task, computer utilization and product development performance. Firms implementing CPD operating in a changing and competitive environment appear to adopt HPMs to integrate collaborative product development task and system features for encouraging IS practices and improving CPD performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]