This article presents a case study which was led in an international company dealing with hydraulic power plant machine design. It exposes a diagnosis of the interface set up between the Research central team (R) and Development local team (D). The diagnosis shows how the information and knowledge are shared among R&D communities. It shows that the explicit knowledge formalized by the Research central team, is known and applied by the local development team, thanks to two types of networking; (1) The networking with experts in charge of communicating and explaining technical instructions applied on project, (2) and the networking between local colleagues. These practices reveal local logic that are not aligned with the company globalisation objectives. As a consequence, it is proposed that new collaborative tools resulting from Web 2.0 (wiki, bogs, collaborative platforms, etc...) can be exploited to effectively support the design activity through social networking with colleagues spread geographically. Today, no actual solution is developed and evaluated.