This study fouces on IT-based NPD organization. Future scholars argue that information technology at the future would change the organizational structure and information-based organization would represent the future organization.
Therefore, manager should consider information as the first design factor for the new product development. A Concurrent Engineering approach can be used as one of the information based product development structure. Today, many companies use this development structure. But the method of organizing the project team for the concurrent engineering is not clear. So, this research concentrate on how to organize the information-based project team.
This research model consists of 4 layers: IT infrastructure, organizing the information-based project team, operating the project team and organization culture.
IT infrastructure means the basic tools that support the NPD organization such as network, groupware, expert system, Database.
In order to organize the information-base project team, this study adopted the interdependence among work units of Thompson(1967) which used information as the organization design variable. The tool for these interdepedence is the entity, process, location matrix which are suggested by Martine(1989).
Operation for the information-based organization and organization culture support these organization. Namely, these two layers which help the project team are maintained effectively and the new product are rapidly developed by team.
This research used the two case studies: one company has the functional team structure as the NPD tool and the other has the project team structure. These two case studies propose the way how to build and operate the information-based organization.
The conclusion of this research is that IT-base NPD organization has the 4 layers. The company which wants to adopt this IT-based NPD structure should follow each layer's contents and must consider the interrelations among the 4 layers.
Namely, the company should consider the organization culture whether the organization cultures are based on the information-based culture or not and prepare the IT infrastructure and operation systems that fit the IT-base organization for the NPD.
