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This paper aims to increase understanding on how co-locating in a multi-firm campus setting could be of value to healthcare organizations.

The paper presents a qualitative case study of two health campuses in Finland. The data comprises interviews with different organizations operating on the campuses, complemented by onsite observations, and analysis of archival data.

Based on the empirical analysis, the value of co-locating as perceived by the organizations operating on campus is grouped into four categories: connectivity, cost-efficiency, community and collaboration (or the “four Cs”).

The study does not aim at statistical genaralizability but rather seeks to draw analytical generalizations based on identified empirical regularities. The developed value framework, the four Cs, contributes to current scholarly knowledge on location strategies.

Furthermore, the managerial implications of the four Cs entail a new twofold role for property management: the traditional facilitator role, which is suitable for delivering the two tangible values of connectivity and cost-efficiency, and the modern era integrator, a community builder that is able to deliver community and collaboration.

Previous literature on healthcare facilities has focused on the technical performance of the buildings, while previous literature on the collaborative value of co-location has studied mainly single-firm corporate campuses. This study uniquely explores the potential value of health campuses, where different private, public and third sector organizations co-locate.

The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the logic of business network formation among the co-located and external actors of a facility.

The research adopts a theory-building approach through developing propositions inductively from the empirical case study on four purposefully sampled modern service station facilities. The focus is on analyzing how a facility and its inherent co-located actors represent an entity that forms a business network with external actors in the facility’s environment.

The findings propose that when co-located with a large number of actors, the facility and its actors represent an entity that is connected to a wide business network of multiple external actors. On the other hand, when co-located with a small number of actors, the facility becomes a part of the overall supply in the surrounding business environment with a differentiated offering for competitive advantage.

The research suggests that an appropriate co-locating strategy, for example, when planning the tenant mix of the facility, can contribute to creating a vivid business network in the external environment, which raises the facility to a role of a central entity in such a network.

The findings explaining how co-location affects the businesses within the facility and within a wider networked environment are novel to the scholarly knowledge on co-location. The research bridges the theories of co-location and business networks that have been treated as separate discourses in previous research.

The purpose of this paper is to develop further understanding of the interdependence between product and organization subsystems in the context of major projects by empirically elaborating the volume-variety matrix.

Projects are perceived as systems that include a product subsystem (the project outcome) and an organization subsystem (the temporary multi-firm organizational network that produces the project outcome). This study addresses product-organization interdependence by analyzing product and organization subsystem components in terms of their uniqueness and reuse across multiple projects. The empirical analysis focuses on four global renewable fuels refinery projects implemented by Neste from 2003 to 2011. The refineries are based on the same proprietary technology but are unique at the project level.

The findings indicate interesting interdependencies between product and organization subsystems when analyzed at the component level: the findings suggest both diagonal and off-diagonal positions in the volume-variety matrix. An example of an off-diagonal position is a reused organization subsystem component associated with a unique product subsystem component, meaning that choosing the same organization in a future project can be used for acquiring an improved and, thereby, unique product subsystem component.

The study elaborates upon the volume-variety matrix in the context of major projects. The findings related to off-diagonal positions in the matrix provide new knowledge on combinations at the component level where a reused organization can be associated with a unique product, and vice versa. This has direct implications for management of projects.

Many literature reviews on project management (PM) research are limited to studies published only in PM journals but some reviews do expand their analysis on PM research published also in journals belonging to the management studies field. However, the authors found no previous literature reviews comparing the PM content in different sectors outside the management studies field. Therefore, the analysis and findings of PM content derived from the sector-specific engineering and technology-focused journals are new. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors analyze PM content in nine different sectors, where each sector and its inherent research is connected to specific engineering, technological, or industry-related disciplines. The authors conduct an evidence-informed literature review on PM knowledge in the distinct literatures of these nine sectors. The period of analysis is 24 years from 1986-2009. The authors discuss potential consequences of the findings’ sector-specificity for future PM domain development.

The perspective on different origins of PM leads to a meta-level PM concept covering several different PM domains, each with its own sector specific and separated development path.

The literature analysis purposefully excluded PM journals and management studies, and the authors focused only on sector-specific engineering and technology-focused journals that represent knowledge and wisdom of different PM contents in nine sectors.

The findings have significant potential to contribute to scholarly discussion on the development of a universal PM theory. For applicability across sectors, the authors suggest a modular PM theory with different sector-specific modules for knowledge, concepts, and underlying assumptions.

Currently, this discussion has been mainly focused on theorizing concepts and approaches in management studies only. This study expands the understanding to engineering and technology-focused journals across nine industry sectors/domains.

In megaprojects, changes in scope and organization may occur continuously. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how actors in a project network make sense of a safety-related process innovation introduced during the design phase.

An inductive single case study of an ongoing nuclear power plant project in Europe was employed to elucidate sensemaking processes using a narrative approach.

The empirical analysis yielded nine distinct narratives regarding the innovation each advancing a different account of the rationale for implementing the new method, and the subjects, objects and implications of the change. The findings suggest that actors’ differing framings of innovation may increase ambiguity and equivocality.

These insights augment existing knowledge of innovation management and system safety in safety-critical megaprojects by revealing project actors’ discrepant sensemaking processes with regard to innovations. To successfully manage sensemaking and its consequences for innovation adoption, managers need to take account of any such discrepancies in sensemaking processes.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce project business as a research field. The project business view in this paper puts focus on the management of firms and their businesses, and this way the paper complements the existing project‐centric view of the role of projects and their management in various business contexts.

The paper proposes a conceptual framework for project business and identify relevant research areas and themes. These research areas and themes are derived by using the knowledge and experience obtained from scientific project business research conducted in Finland since the early 1990s.

This paper describes project business as a research field by introducing a project business framework and the four major research areas inherent in the framework: management of a project, management of a project‐based firm, management of a project network, and management of a business network. It also suggests specific research areas and themes within the framework that are relevant and contribute to new knowledge in the project business field.

The project business framework described in this paper, including the suggested research areas and themes, is important in focusing research and for development of practical application of project‐based business activities in firms and in public organizations.

The paper reveals avenues that lead towards the development of a new body of knowledge for project business that focuses on managing both firms and projects effectively in their networked business environments.

The requirements of various participants of a project may conflict with the strategy of the project's parent organization and, consequently, the project may form its individual strategy independently, to better align with the factors in its environment. The purpose of this paper is to describe the formation of the strategy of a project as a response to the project's environment, providing insight into a project's strategy formation, where the project does not merely reflect the strategy of the parent but where the parent is only one influential actor (of many) in the project's environment.

To increase understanding of the relationship between the project's environment, the strategy of the project‐based firm and the strategy formation of a project, the authors analyze a project of a metallurgy firm in an empirical case study. The authors use project literature and corporate venturing literature, look for the dimensions of project strategy and the factors in the project's environment and study how the factors in the environment shape the project's strategy.

The analysis suggests that factors in the internal and external environments affect the strategy formation with varying strength. The strategy of the case project was formed in micro‐level iterative processes, in interaction between dimensions of strategy of the project and factors in environment. The empirical case study suggests that a project initiated with strong influence of external factors has to face contradiction between the strategy and related influential factors in the parent organization of the project.

This paper contributes to our understanding of how the strategy of an individual project is formed through micro‐level processes that are related to external and internal factors that affect the strategy formation.

The purpose of this research note is to address theory building in the field of projects and temporary organizations.

This research note builds on commenting and deriving arguments from three main sources (the Transition paper, the End‐states paper, and the Chunk paper) that all contribute to theory building in the field of temporary organizations and/or projects. In addition to an Introduction section in the beginning and Discussion section at the end, this research note is organized to comprise four sections: Time, End states, Boundaries, and Chunk.

This research note expands the temporary organization view to include dimensions that fall outside the organizational dimension. Such dimensions include logic‐related, immaterial, maybe even entrepreneurial issues that may reside outside the boundaries of any organizational entity. Furthermore, such dimensions include end states and potentially objects that (may) affect the end states such as opportunity‐seizing or risk‐taking attitudes, or accidental or serendipitous incidents/events that would occur “outside the temporary organization” in the uncertain environment (the environment being collaborative, competitive, or “random”). This discussion relates to the challenging question of defining boundaries and understanding their dynamic and ever‐changing nature. The discussion part of the paper introduces the term “business enterprise” in contrast to the terms “project” or “temporary organization”, when referring to logic‐related and other aspects that would otherwise fall outside the organizational dimension.

Based on the findings of this paper, further conceptual and empirical research and academic debates on temporary organizations and projects is needed. This would elevate combinations of existing theories and propose several new theories, not just one theory.

Existing theories on temporary organizations and projects and the ways in which they are used in individual studies are too single‐sided and therefore not too helpful in explaining the new organizational forms referred to in this paper. Therefore, cross‐disciplinary combinations of several existing theories are needed, and potentially new theories also need to be developed. This research note and the three main sources (the Transition paper, the End‐states paper, and the Chunk paper) serve as a good start for such future theory‐building and theory‐combining studies.

Previous literature on project strategy has adopted the narrow view that a project is to be conducted under the governance of a single strong sponsor or parent organization. The purpose of this study is to provide a critical analysis on prior project management (PM) literature addressing different context‐specific strategies of single projects.

Literature analysis.

There are two important determinants in the project's context that affect the strategy of a single project: a project's autonomy in its environment and the complexity of project's stakeholder environment. Based on these two determinants, we characterize four types of alternative positions that projects can have in their context: parent's subordinate and autonomous projects that occur in a stakeholder environment that is not complex, and projects with weak and autonomous positions in a complex stakeholder environment. The developed project strategy framework is applied in the context of innovation projects. The analysis results include strategy contents for different types of innovation projects in terms of the project's direction and success.

This study contributes to PM research by broadening the focus from mere tactical‐level projects towards projects as strategic entities, and by suggesting the management of projects differently in different contexts. Further, theoretical and empirical research is proposed on both testing the suggested framework and elaborating it for different project types.

The paper opens up avenues towards the development of new and context‐specific PM bodies of knowledge.

This paper seeks to address the risks for a main contractor firm's project business that arise from subcontractors' inter‐organizational relationships in complex‐ and dynamic‐project networks.

Existing project risk management research neglects the management of such relational risks in networks. This paper discusses this un‐researched area by analyzing triads representing sub‐networks of three actors in a larger network. The empirical study employed several semi‐structured interviews in two global contractor organizations. Critical incidents identified in triadic settings were used to explain the logic of how risks arose from subcontractors' inter‐organizational relationships.

This paper identifies four categories of risk sources characterized by subcontractors' inter‐organizational relationships. The four risk source categories are based on subcontractors' relationships with other subcontractors, the contractor's competitor the contractor's client and non‐business actors (e.g. a local authority or regulatory body).

The empirical study emphasizes the dynamic nature of the risks that business relationships cause in the main contractor's current and future projects and business. Furthermore, the empirical analysis suggests that the risks arising from subcontractors' relationships have an impact on two different layers: the temporary project network layer and the permanent business network layer. The impacts of risk on the temporary project network layer relate to specific sales and delivery projects, whereas the impacts of risk on the permanent business network layer relate often to changes in the network position of the business players.

This paper suggests a novel risk management approach, where risks and opportunities arising from subcontractors' relationships are actively taken into account in subcontractor management.