  In a global and technology oriented world the requirements that products and
services have to fulfill are increasing and are getting more complicated.
Research and development (R&D) is becoming increasingly important in creating
the knowledge that makes research and business more competitive. Companies are
obliged to produce more rapidly, more effectively and more efficiently. In
order to meet these requirements and to secure the viability of business
processes, services and products R&D teams need to access and retrieve
information from as many sources as possible. From the other perspective
virtual teams are important mechanisms for organizations seeking to leverage
scarce resources across geographic and other boundaries moreover; virtual
collaboration has become vital for most organizations. This is particularly
true in the context of designing new product and service innovation. Such
collaboration often involves a network of partners located around the world.
However at the R&D project level, dealing with such distributed teams
challenges both managers and specialists. In new product development, it is
necessary to put together the growing different capabilities and services with
the goal, through cooperation between suppliers and customers, service
providers and scientific institutions to achieve innovations of high quality.
In this paper based on comprehensive literature review of recent articles, at
the first step provides an primary definition and characterization of virtual
R&D team; next, the potential value created by virtual R&D teams for new
product development is explored and lastly along with a guide line for future
study, it is argued that the establishing of virtual R&D teams should be given
consideration in the management of R&D projects.
