Managing Knowledge Integration Across Boundaries

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 put forward a consistent set of ideas, methods and tools useful to interpret, analyze and act upon the processes of knowledge integration across boundaries.

Fredrik Tell, Professor in Business Administration at Linkoping University and Director of the KITE Research Group, , Christian Berggren, Professor in Industrial Management, Linkoping University, Stefano Brusoni, Professor of Technology and Innovation Management, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology(ETH Zurich), Andrew Van de Ven, Vernon H. Heath Professor of Organizational Innovation and Change, Carlson School of the University of Minnesota

Fredrik Tell is Professor in Business Administration at Linkoping 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 Linkoping 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 Zurich). 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 OrganizationScience, 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.