R&D CONSORTIA AS BOUNDARY ORGANISATIONS: MISALIGNMENT AND ASYMMETRY OF BOUNDARY MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The article presents a qualitative multiple case study of three multilateral publicprivate R&D consortia representing different industrial sectors. Using the practice-based view as a theoretical lens, we explore the interplay between the deliberate and emergent practices of boundary management across the following three dimensions: (1) boundary bridging focus; (2) boundary crossing arrangements; and (3) collaborative governance arrangements. Drawing on interviews, documentary analysis and observational data, we describe the misalignment between the deliberate and emergent aspects of boundary management, which can be caused by the funders' reporting requirements, power differentials between collaborators and lack of contextual understanding. These factors, accompanied by path-dependency and confidentiality issues, may result in asymmetrical boundary management, whereby a selective focus on a specific boundary (or set of boundaries) combined with an unequal development of boundary bridges within the collaboration may lead to the crossing of some boundaries being prioritised at the expense of others.

How do managerial techniques evolve over time? The distortion of “facilitation” in healthcare service improvement

“…This gap can result in the mismatch between the intended and actual use of managerial techniques which has variously been conceptualized as the lack of innovation fidelity (Lewis and Seibold 1993), misalignment between deliberate and emergent strategies (Omidvar and Kislov 2016) or incompatibility of the newly introduced knowledge with an organization's prior knowledge (Collm and Schedler 2014;Mariano and Casey 2015). According to Lozeau, Langley and Denis (2002), such a mismatch can take several forms:…”

Development of absorptive capacity over time and across boundaries: The case of R&D consortia

“…First, we conceptualize AC in the highly diverse and multidimensional context of R&D consortia. AC is deeply entangled with the presence and configuration of boundaries which abound in R&D consortia with complex organizational arrangement, and heterogonous partners (Dougherty and Dunne, 2011;Omidvar and Kislov, 2015;Santos and Eisenhardt, 2005) where it relies on the partners' ability to orchestrate and enact learning across inter-organizational, intraorganizational, and practice boundaries at the first instance and to embed and replicate that knowledge within their respective organizations at the later stages. Easterby-Smith et al (2008), acknowledging that AC literature takes boundaries for granted, mainly focused on organizational boundaries from a power dynamics perspective, and they only analyzed single organizations.…”