Experiences in developing collaborative engineering environments: An action research approach

Due to the increasing amount of collaborative work in engineering, it is now necessary to create environments that foster the coordination and cooperation among engineering groups. The aim of this paper is to present a methodology to design and integrate ‘Collaborative Engineering Environments’ supported by tools that enable cooperative work and intellectual capital sharing. The resulting methodology to create ‘Collaborative Engineering Environments’ was developed and refined through a set of action research cycles applied to three case studies. The experiences and reflections of every case are described to contribute to a better understanding of how collaborative environments should be built up.