Managing Knowledge Integration Across Boundaries

by Christian Berggren, Frederik Tell (Editor), Stefano Brusoni, Andrew Van de Ven

Overview

Knowledge integration - the purposeful combination of specialized and complementary knowledge to achieve specific tasks - is becoming increasingly important for organizations facing rapidly changing institutional environments, globalized markets, and fast-paced technological developments. The need for knowledge integration is driven by knowledge specialization and its geographic and organizational distribution in the global economy. The increasing complexity and relevance of the knowledge integration problem is apparent in emerging new fields of research, such as open innovation, or the merging of existing ones, e.g. organizational learning and strategy. In global competition, the successful management of knowledge integration underpins firms' ability to innovate, generate profit, grow and, ultimately, survive. This book provides conceptual contributions as well as empirical studies that examine knowledge integration essentially as a 'boundary' problem. Knowledge integration becomes a problem when boundaries between knowledge fields, and the institutions that preside over those fields, are not clear, or become fluid and contestable. This fluidity, and the competitive pressures this fluidity generates, are persistent and permanent features of the world we live in. This book puts forward a consistent set of ideas, methods and tools useful to interpret, analyze and act upon the processes of knowledge integration across boundaries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192507471
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	12/06/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Fredrik Tell is Professor in Business Administration at Link?ping University and Director of the KITE Research Group. His research revolves around implications of innovation and knowledge integration for firm strategies, competitiveness and organization. His research has been presented as book chapters in a number of edited volumes and as research articles in journals such as Creativity and Innovation Management, Industrial and Corporate Change, and International Journal of Project Management to name a few. He currently serves as one of the editors of Industrial and Corporate Change (UK&Scandinavia). Christian Berggren is Professor in Industrial Management at Link?ping University and served as director for the KITE program during her first four years. He has been involved in international debates regarding industry, knowledge and innovation since the early 1990s, critiquing lean production-rhetoric, as well as disruptive innovation theories, and proposing creative accumulation as an alternative. Currently he focuses on studies of innovators in emerging economies, and the technology and policy challenges involved in sustainability transitions, in particular in the automotive industry. His work has appeared in several books and various journals like Research Policy, Industrial and Corporate Change, Sloan Management Review, World Development, Ecological Economics, Journal of Business Research amoung others. Stefano Brusoni is Professor of Technology and Innovation Management at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Z?rich). His core research lies in understanding how organizations and individual combine and integrate dispersed knowledge in order to become routinely innovative. His work has appeared in various journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Research Policy, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Studies, Industrial and Corporate Change. He is Editor (Continental Europe) of Industrial and Corporate Change, and member of the Editorial Board of Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, and Academy of Management Discoveries. He is also Chair of the Knowledge and Innovation IG of the Strategic Management Society. Andrew Van de Ven is Vernon H. Heath Professor of Organizational Innovation and Change in the Carlson School of the University of Minnesota. Van de Ven's research over the years has dealt with the Nominal Group brainstorming technique, program planning, organization design, processes of organizational innovation and change, and methods of engaged scholarship. He is co-author of 12 books, including: The Innovation Journey (1999, 2008), Organization Change and Innovation Processes (2000), Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation (2004), and Engaged Scholarship (2007) all with Oxford University Press. During 2000-2001 Van de Ven was President of the Academy of Management. He currently is serving as founding editor of the Academy of Management Discoveries.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction, Fredrik Tell, Christian Berggren, Stefano Brusoni, and Andrew Van de Ven
Part I: Conceptual Underpinnings
2. Managing Knowledge Integration: Bridging Epistemic Boundaries, Fredrik Tell
3. Effective Management of Collective Design Processes: Knowledge Profiles and the Sequential Ordering of Tasks, Steven Postrel
4. Knowledge Complexity, Boundary Objects, and Innovation, Andrew Van de Ven and Shaker Zahra,
5. Absorptive Capacity and Knowledge Integration: From Path Dependence to Combinatory Creation?, Christian Berggren, Jorg Sydow, and Fredrik Tell
6. Extending Nonaka's Knowledge Creation Theory: Externalization and Interaction as Complementary Bridging Modes, Lars Lindkvist and Marie Bengtsson
7. Knowledge Integration Processes and the Scope of Design, Per Aman, Hans Andersson, and Michael Hobday
Part II: Boundary Crossing Knowledge Integration in Context
8. Open Innovation: Managing External Knowledge Integration Across Multiple Boundaries, Lars Bengtsson, Nicolette Lakemond, Keld Laursen, and Fredrik Tell
9. Division of Labour, Supplier Relationships and Outsourcing Decisions, Federica Ceci and Andrea Prencipe
10. How Boundary Organizations Facilitate Knowledge Creation Across Diverse Communities, Markus Perkmann
11. Struggling with Boundaries and Stickiness: Strategies for Acquiring and Integrating External Knowledge in Emerging Economy Firms, Filiz Solmaz Karabag and Christian Berggren
12. Knowledge, Uncertainty, and the Boundaries of the Firm: Evidence From a Study of Formula One Racing Constructors, 1950-2007, Fabrizio Castelluci and Gianluca Carnabuci
13. Talking Through Objects: The Socio-Political Dynamics Embodied in Boundary Objects in Architectural Work, Dmitrijs Kravcenko and Jacky Swan
14. Restructuring Global Organization: Retrieval of Knowledge Across Team Boundaries, Sirkka Jarvenpaa and Yongsuk Kim
15. Informal R&D Collaboration: Implications for Firm-Level Knowledge Integration and Patent Performance, Annapoornima Subramanian, Kwanghui Lim, and Pek-hooi Soh
16. Individual Project Competence: Managing Knowledge Integration Across Boundaries, Karin Bredin, Cecilia Enberg, Camilla Niss, and Jonas Soderlund
Part III: Concluding Remarks
17. Managing Knowledge Integration Across Doundaries: Implications and New Directions, Fredrik Tell, Christian Berggren, Stefano Brusoni, and Andrew Van de Ven