Collaborative practices in new product development projects involving suppliers

Collaboration with suppliers in New Product Development (NPD) is essential for business competitiveness. However, the management of such collaborative project needs to focus on interactions between team members from different companies since they performed inter-organizational activities. While the impact of collaboration with suppliers on NPD project performance has been widely studied, the investigation of practices to support daily collaborative activities between both teams has received limited attention. This paper aims at developing a framework of operational practices for successful inter-organizational collaboration in NPD. The practices enacted by both project teams in six case studies were examined according to the stages of the collaboration and a knowing perspective. The results revealed some peculiarities linked to the inter-organizational context. Practices interact with each other across stages with a specific dynamic. More particularly, early in the project, practices to justify the collaboration with the suppliers are determinant for practices related to the creation of social interactions between project members and project commitment. The results also show that boundary objects are useful formal socialization mechanisms for supporting the undertaking of collaborative work.