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Adopting social software in organizational knowledge sharing activities has been argued to improve communication and outreach to key stakeholders. However, when dealing with social technologies in product development settings, organizations and individuals face a variety of barriers that hamper the success of these tools. Therefore a contextualized understanding of these challenges as well as the factors that influence these challenges is needed. By means of a qualitative, exploratory study we identify and map existing influencing factors with related challenges. The most significant concerns raised during the study concerned organizational activities, especially change management. Thirty-nine challenges were identified, classified and discussed in order to provide the product development community with practical evidence, and also to inform future research directions in managing social software in product development settings.

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Social Software for Product Development - Explorative Study on Influencing Factors and related Challenges

Adopting social software in organizational knowledge sharing activities has been argued to improve communication and outreach to key stakeholders. However, when dealing with social technologies in product development settings, organizations and individuals face a variety of barriers that hamper the success of these tools. Therefore a contextualized understanding of these challenges as well as the factors that influence these challenges is needed. By means of a qualitative, exploratory study we identify and map existing influencing factors with related challenges. The most significant concerns raised during the study concerned organizational activities, especially change management. Thirty-nine challenges were identified, classified and discussed in order to provide the product development community with practical evidence, and also to inform future research directions in managing social software in product development settings.