New product/service development is a prerequisite to the success of most firms to gain competitive advantage. To do so, these firms examine internal processes in order to optimize and streamline product/service innovation. Further, they interact with external environment to gain knowledge necessary to develop and improve their product development process. In fact, it has become critical for an organization to have business process re-engineering (BPR) coupled with management of knowledge from external actors as the suppliers, customers, research centers, and partners.

The special session invites papers and research efforts that investigate efforts to continue optimizing internal processes through interactions with external actors, thus, the combination of BPR, and knowledge management for the new product/serivce development.

Topics may include but not limited to:

• BPR current initiative and practices and impact on product/service innovation
• ICT-based inter-organizational collaboration.
• Inter-organizational communities of practice.
• Strategic communities for knowledge creation and sharing.
• Methods used to optimize the new product development processes.
• Organizational structures for communication optimization.
• Internal and external competences development and acquisition for product innovation.
• Case studies of small and medium enterprises and knowledge creation and sharing.
• Case studies about new product development in complex industries.

Papers will be evaluated for originality, significance, clarity, and contribution.  It is IBIMA policy to send complete papers to two reviewers for full blind peer review and to send a summary of review back to the author(s) .   Short papers/abstracts will be reviewed by reviewer and/or the editor.  All review comments and suggestions should be addressed in the final submission.  Submitted Papers must not have been previously published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere.

Conference proceedings will be published as an e-book on a CD (ISBN: 978-0-9821489-0-7) and will be published on the "Communications of the IBIMA" Journal

Indicate the session name on your manuscript.  All Submissions should be sent to only one e-mail: either  Cairo2009@ibima.org or the session chair at  nouha.taifi@ebms.unile.it

Copyright © 2008 International Business Information Management Association. All rights reserved.