u- nication [11]. Next Generation Mobile Communications Ecosystem Technology & Intellectual Product Testing Property Operators System Engineering Concept End Users Manufacturing Research Development Sales & Distribution Collaboration Contributing to Knowledge Management Figure 12.4 NPD process The main goal of collaborative product development is to integrate and leverage knowledge, technolo- gies, and resources among all the collaborators, usually geographically distant, to quickly respond to the market and satisfy customer needs. A good example is the existence of global R&D centers of many ICT companies (Nokia Siemens Networks, Huawei, Vodafone, etc.). Another example is the strategic partnerships between vendors for the development of products like NSN and Juniper alliance for the development of MPLS-TP. CPD is a business strategy, work process and collection of software applications that facilitates different organizations to work together on the development of a product. It is evolving into a process that consists of demand analysis, defining the overall goal and task, decomposing the overall task into hierarchical sub-tasks, distributing sub-tasks to different collaborative enterprises, solving the sub-tasks, synthesizing the sub-solutions, finally providing the overall solutions. 12.4.3 Knowledge Management within NPD Most approaches of knowledge management process modeling do not acknowledge the relationship between KM and NPD. However, it is important to include KM exercise as part of the NPD process. would not be illogical if KM is recognized as a sub process to the larger scale NPD process. Knowledge management activities need to be recognized as an integral part of employees' responsi- bilities. Employees need time to seek out knowledge, to reflect, to share what they know, to change the way they do things based on knowledge. They need to know that these activities are regarded not only as acceptable, but important and necessary, by the organization and for NPD process. As illustrated in [12], knowle