Recommendations for e-learning in New Product Development teams

Development of new products (NPD) requires professionals to collaboratively find new, creative solutions and approaches in order to come up with new products. In the context of NPD, professionals seldom are co-located. This implies that work and learning take place via electronic facilities. The idSpace project aims to develop an integrated, web based environment for collaborative distributed product innovation. This paper investigates which requirements need to be taken into account to optimally support a team’s collaborative learning while working on new product design. After a short introduction of the idSpace project we will investigate the specific learning needs of NPD-teams. To meet these needs we propose development of tailored recommendations in which creative problem solving. learning and collaboration strategies are combined. We will focus in this paper on the methods and requirements for the design of configurable recommendations for creative task support of NPD teams that can be derived from CSCL and CSCW research.