From intangibles identification to Requirements for Intangibles Management
Résumé
In order to maintain their leadership, corporate companies have to continuously find new ways to efficiently respond to the ever-changing customer needs. To do so, companies must rely on both business strategies and rules, as well as the unique capital provided by human knowledge developed during years of experience. It became evident for organisations that knowledge is a fundamental economical asset (Strassmann, 1998). Our work is focused on finding methods to foster this knowledge, referred to as intangibles, in the context of a company that adopted product-line engineering to provide railway transport solutions. The core element of product-line engineering is the use of a unique “reference platform” which may be adapted in order to create a set of distinct products. When responding to a customer's demand, the reference platform has to be properly adapted in order to map the specific needs of a customer. Our goal is to find a solution for managing intangibles involved in the process of adapting the “reference platform”. We have therefore studied the adaptation process in order to understand how intangibles impact this process and how they can be managed. The study was divided in two stages. The first stage had the goal to identify intangibles through interviews. The second stage consisted in the choice and analysis of a specific activity where to apply management of the intangibles previously selected. Results of our investigation showed there was a need for a workspace supporting intangibles management and organisational learning. Therefore, based on the set of needs identified during our study, we defined a set of basic requirements for the future workspace. In this paper we present all the steps of our research from the intangibles identification until the requirements definition for the workspace.