Balancing trust and knowledge protection in inter-organisational product design collaboration

Apart from rules, regulations and technical support to protect crucial product design information and knowledge, trust can be a decisive factor for the success or failure of interorganisational product development cooperation. This paper shows the correlation between knowledge protection and trust. Product development cooperation's success depends on information sharing in between the team. Hence, the question concerning the level of knowledge protection is usually a question about the level of trust, too. Finally, the level of trust should then be included into existing product development methods to balance teams; trust in cooperation and to protect development data from misuse.