Print Email Facebook Twitter Supplier's sales engineer as a knowledge worker Title Supplier's sales engineer as a knowledge worker Author Kopecka, J.A. Santema, S.C. Hultink, H.J. Faculty Industrial Design Engineering Department Product Innovation Management Date 2012-12-31 Abstract The paper forms part of a multiple case study in progress that focuses on information relationships, i.e., the exchange of information and knowledge at the micro-social level between supplier and buyer firms in the fuzzy front end of product development. The micro-social level is made up of dyadic information relationships between the Design Engineer of buyer firms and the Sales Engineer of supplier firms. The case study explores the information relationship through the lens of three theoretical perspectives, namely: early supplier involvement in product development, knowledge management, and the concepts of social embeddedness and tie strengths belonging to economic sociology. The paper describes the concept of supplier’s Sales Engineer as a knowledge worker, and explains how the concept represents a specific type of supplier involvement in early product development. By using the preliminary findings of four case studies, the paper shows how the concept of the Sales Engineer as a knowledge worker has been understood and applied in practice The paper concludes with managerial implications regarding the conditions that need to be in place in order to make the knowledge transfer through the Sales Engineer robust and dependable. Subject suppliers sales engineer, design engineer, product development, knowledge transfer, socialties To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:18804943-4286-45c6-a95f-6d4fab427a03 Publisher IPSERA Source Proceedings of the 21st IPSERA annual conference Purchasing & Supply Management in a Changing World, Naples (Italy), 1-4 April, 2012 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2012 Kopecka, J.A., Santema, S.C., Hultink, H.J. Files PDF Kopecka.pdf 274.7 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:18804943-4286-45c6-a95f-6d4fab427a03/datastream/OBJ/view