A new knowledge management tool for product development in micro-companies

The main purpose of this paper is to present a new Knowledge Management (KM) tool for product development in micro-companies. To develop this proposal, the first part presents a state of the art about knowledge management and micro-companies specificities and shows the need for them to get, with reduced resources consumption, new and easy-to-use KM tools. The second part presents the new KM tool. The idea is to create information cards to capture knowledge by conducting interviews. To deliver the knowledge in an easy and efficient way, all the information cards specify the job and the step of development related to their contents. The third part presents a case study on a specific micro-company. 16 knowledge cards in an 18-hours work were written and are currently exploited by the micro-company. Future works are ongoing to determine how exhaustive are the cards and to measure qualitatively and quantitatively the performance of this KM tool. We believe it will save time, reduce costs and reduce risks of errors for product development in micro-companies.