A very good summary of an article published by Xavier Comtesse - Read more here - original here if you can read French.
Xavier explains how the technologies available today allow the transfer of knowledge to customers, so that they can become more involved in the value chain, thus helping companies to become highly productive, as the only way to survive competition from low cost providers (which sometimes does not mean low value, there are a lot of good engineers in Eastern Europe, China or India).Xavier Comtesse offers a great tool to help companies define their strategy and understand how to move forward and best use knowledge transfers to improve productivity. He also presents an example of how this can work in a presentation available here (in French as well), but the matrix is in english and give a good idea of what can be done).
