Manifestation of Language Transfer Problem During the New Product Development Process

Process of new product development is a complex process where many different stakeholders from both inside and outside the firm participate. Among them, this paper specifically focuses on the users and a manufacturer and their joint problem-solving process. Understanding the joint problem-solving process between users and a manufacturer has become an increasingly important issue because users are important sources of information for product design and development. However, there is a strong boundary between them and an issue of communication gaps created by language problems challenges both groups. This paper extends what we know about firm boundaries from the existing studies, and focuses on a specific type of collaborative product design process between a manufacturer and its users. By using the grounded theory building method with multiple data sources from a manufacturing company in Canada, we develop a process model of how user-manufacturer problem-solving language differences can negatively affect the collaboration. By doing so, we conceptualized problem-solving language difference and qualitatively observed them. Then the discussion shifts towards the actual process of how the language boundary can be mitigated by local coordination based on the technical interdependencies between user requirement and technological implementation.