Management of collaborative design process

#The Internet has proved to be a valuable tool for sharing design information between interested parties. Presently, the sharing of design information generally takes the form of transferring files from one engineer to another. Existing methods allow for exchanging completed designs between parties or incorporating one completed design into a lager, more complex design. There are significant benefits, however, to providing a way for various parties to access an incomplete design, i.e., a design that has not been fully developed to perform its intended function. Often there are parties that have a vested interest in making the design successful even though they are not actually responsible for the design itself. Examples of these interested parties are contract manufacturers and component suppliers. These parties are generally excluded from the design process until a design is completed. Their participation has the potential to enhance the design and speed up product development.

#Overall, the existing methods may have the disadvantages which include, but are not limited to: a) outside parties are not allowed to witness the design at an incomplete stage; b) the engineers who are responsible for the specific portions of the design are not identified; c) the process of granting access to proprietary information is not automated; and d) current methods do not facilitate the payment of royalties by manufacturers that use the design information.

#Groups adhering to open source programming techniques do grant full access to incomplete designs to the public. However, in so doing, their designs are no longer proprietary. This makes it difficult to obtain royalties from those who make commercial use of the design.

#FIG. 1 shows basic components of a design management process;

#FIG. 2 shows a flowchart of a membership process; and

#FIG. 3 shows an example of a website layout used in the design management process.

#Like reference symbols in the various drawings indicate like elements.

#As shown in FIG. 1, the invention pertains to the exchange of information between three groups: a design team, a website owner, and outside parties. The design team includes a collection of one or more processors (e.g. workstations) including a design workstation 1. The website owner controls one or more workstations, including owner workstation 2 and two or more data servers, including servers 6 and 7. Data servers are workstations specially designed to disseminate hypertext markup language (HTML) files, otherwise known as webpages, to other workstations. Outside parties include guests (such as a guest 8) and members (such as a member 11), each with a workstation (workstations 9 and 12 respectively).

#Design workstation 1 is connected to design server 7. Via this connection, the design team uploads design information from design workstation 1 to design server 7. Owner workstation 2 is running three processes: a membership process 5, a design management process 3, and a billing process 4. Design management process 3 and billing process 4 are connected to design server 7. Membership process 5 is connected to guest server 6.