Int J Interact Des Manuf DOI 10.1007/s12008-017-0372-5 ORIGINAL PAPER Social collaboration software for virtual teams: case studies Pedro Orta-Castañon 1 · Pedro Urbina-Coronado 1 · Horacio Ahuett-Garza 1 · Marcela Hernández-de-Menéndez 1 · Ruben Morales-Menendez 1 Received: 11 November 2016 / Accepted: 3 January 2017 © Springer-Verlag France 2017 Abstract The global product development is done by global teams being physical, Virtual Teams or blend in-between. Millennials are the new engineers and designers that con- form Virtual Teams. Virtual Teams members interact through various electronic media. Even the social collaboration plat- forms such as Facebook, Skype, Whatsapp, etc are software tools or apps designed to enable social interaction of a group of people; these tools facilitate communication, transfer and share images, videos and files, organize events or meetings. Furthermore these tools are available in smartphones, tablets and/or personal computers in many different operating sys- tems, so they are well known for Millennials generation. This article presents case studies of global projects where social collaboration platforms solve the communication constraints between students from different countries generating good results. Keywords Virtual team · Social collaboration platform · Competencies B Marcela Hernández-de-Menéndez marcelahernandez@itesm.mx Pedro Orta-Castañon porta@itesm.mx Pedro Urbina-Coronado urbinacoronado@itesm.mx Horacio Ahuett-Garza horacio.ahuett@itesm.mx Ruben Morales-Menendez rmm@itesm.mx 1 School of Engineering and Sciences, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Av E Garza Sada # 2501, Col. Tecnológico, 64849 Monterrey, NL, Mexico 1 Motivation The changes that are transforming the engineering prac- tice include the ability to communicate in real time, the prominence of international markets, the development of global product supply chains, the shift to offshore manu- facturing, the scale and reach multinational corporations and the emergence of engineering workforces around the world. The development of global products is done through global teams. These teams may be physical, virtual or some blend in-between. A physical team implies members, who may be from various countries, are co-located and work together face-to-face. Virtual Team members interact through various means of electronic communication. To work effectively in Virtual Teams, engineers need an expanded competencies set. Some of these skills are avoiding ethnocentrism, communicating across cultures, and understanding the impact of culture on how engineering processes are executed, choosing the right form of electronic communication, managing electronic files across geographically dispersed groups, and building trust when face-to-face meetings are not possible [32]. The Society for Industrial and Organization [38], pub- lished the 10 top workspace trends. Trend #3 is related to Virtual Teams, where it says that “work is getting more in what you do than where you do”. Companies are getting to be more flexible with employees that do not need to be at an office. Bellotti and Bly [4] is one of the first studies of distributed collaboration between product design and engineering teams using computers and internet. Larsson [24] presented an observational study of a col- laborative design project, teams members were globally dispersed (Volvo project). They confirm that design is a social activity rather than systematic processes. 123