Managing Creation and Learning of New Expertise in Automobile Development Projects

Abstract

Performance in a car project has numerous dimensions and hinges on the fragile quality and coherence of the technical compromises reached throughout the design process. Besides the traditional performance criteria such as cost, quality or delay, new ones (security, depollution, recycling, acoustics, consumption, etc.) have been recently introduced in the management of car projects. For each of these criteria new experts have emerged and prescribe specifications to designers. The accumulation of these specifications and their degree of intelligibility threaten the learning capacities of designers and consequently the innovative capacity of projects. Furthermore, given the limited resources (in staff and time) that can be spent on learning new expertise, it seems that the best answer would be to invent new design practices which enhance efficiency. In the following text we define the characteristics of a new learning model by examining, in particular, the management tools used to stimulate, build and steer such learning. The introduction of new recycling expertise at Renault, studied by the authors over the past four years, and the intervention strategy that was imagined in that case, is used to illustrate these different points.