Knowledge flows in early stages of product development

Global trends raise the complexity in both, products and product development processes. Therefore knowledge, creativity and capabilities for generating innovations become critical factors in global competition. In this context, organisational ambidexterity, namely the ability to pursue exploratory and exploitative innovation simultaneously, becomes important. This paper shows how industrial companies can develop ambidextrous organisational units to actively respond to fast changing demands. Therefore knowledge transfers in the early stages of product development are analysed and referring to this, the impact of social relations between persons is shown. The developed model emphasises, how to handle both - knowledge stocks and knowledge flows - within a fast changing environment, to deal with uncertainty in the early stages. Moreover the model gives practical implications on how knowledge flows can be measured and what role leadership has for an innovative company.