Social Product Development - Facebook Meets CAD

In a post titled, Social Work, Stephanie Neil, Managing Automation’s Senior Editor, examined the role of Social Networking as it relates to the B2B sector.

As a freelance contributor to Managing Automation, I was keen to read Stephanie’s take on the subject. She wrote, “…at what point does this social networking stuff become destructive rather than productive?"

There's been a lot written lately on social networking and much of it boils down to that question. And I agree with Neil that it's important to think about. She suggests there be a business plan for line of business managers that outlines "process workflows that include the use of these tools."

For example, where along a product development cycle would it make sense to have a link to a wiki for swapping ideas about a project? How about instant messaging? Shouldn’t that be a must-have (not a nice-to-have) when it comes to coordinating multiple constituents in real time? 

Social Product Development

In her post, Neil unveils a possible answer in the form of "social product development," a term coined by PTC, a PLM provider. Sort of Facebook meets CAD, but not exactly. The company describes it like this:

Social product development will allow teams to better collaborate across borders and time zones, and will enable innovation of endless possibilities.

Within the next week or two, Neil reports, PTC will unveil some very cool social computing capabilities that take product development to a new level.

And I'll be monitoring the results here.