Virtual Product Development in University-Enterprise Partnership

Development teams involved in product development are often geographically and temporally distributed, and there is a high level of outsourcing in product development efforts. Enterprises give rise to a special type of virtual enterprise, in which each company maintains the greatest flexibility and business independence. This paper presents a vision of next generation engineering working environments and describes a core information technology on which future systems can be built. Cooperative processes are not the automatic results of implementing collaborative, real-time communication technologies, but the result of a carefully designed and systematically maintained virtual team development plan. This paper discusses the critical issues of the virtual product development and builds a general architecture of an experimental platform for training, research and consulting in the new digital economy, located in the PREMINV center from University "POLITEHNICA" of Bucharest.