Supplier Involvement in Product Development: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Working Paper

The paper reports the preliminary findings of four current case studies on supplier involvement in product development from the respective perspectives of Engineering, Purchasing and Suppliers. The supplier involvement is studied from the viewpoint of how supplier information and knowledge are deployed in the fuzzy front end of product development. The objective of the case studies is twofold. First: to learn more about the conditions under which the search, acquisition and utilization of supplier information and knowledge take place. Second: to explore whether these conditions are affected by tie strength of the information relationships among Engineering, Purchasing, and Suppliers