ABSTRACT
In recent years, the speed at which new technologies have been developing and existing technologies changing, together with the increasing international competition in high-tech industries, has led to changes in the business models used to organise and manage product innovation. Increasingly, new products draw on diverse and complex technologies, such as electronics, mechatronics, software engineering, and so on, all of which are unlikely to be available within even a very large organisation, either because they are outside the core competences of the particular organisation, or because the development of small specialist organisations make it more cost-effective for a large organisation to collaborate with such smaller organisations when developing new products. In this new form of new product development, knowledge flows across organisational boundaries. As management accounting and control researchers, we are especially interested in the governance of organisations which engage in such collaborative product development.
