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The purpose of this paper is to examine innovative practices and emphasize the mechanism of knowledge transfer across knowledge boundaries. By comparing and discussing the emerging boundary issues in knowledge transfer among small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) registered in the incubation centers in China, this paper identified the main knowledge transfer approach and several contextual and organizational factors impacting knowledge transfer.

The authors conduct 39 semi-structured in-depth interviews with employees working within business incubation centers in China. The study uses thematic analysis for data analysis.

Our results contribute to the literature of knowledge transfer and in particular to our understanding of boundary conditions and knowledge transfer approaches in emerging economies. The results also highlight several contextual and organizational factors which impact knowledge transformation across the pragmatic boundary in the context of China.

First, organizations need to establish an effective process with tools to accommodate novelty; second, organizations should be aware of the impact of entrepreneurial orientation on innovative performance; and third, it will help organizations if they adopt and integrate information-rich media in managing innovative practices.

This research highlights the impact of contextual and organizational factors of SMEs on knowledge transfer in emerging markets and chooses incubation centers as study subjects, which is an organizational context that has not been thoroughly studied due to its unique nature and emerging complexity.

As a company that has continuously achieved business innovation, Apple in the United States has successfully applied strategic knowledge creation to produce a series of products that integrate various digital devices as well as diverse contents and applications, such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, based on a corporate vision of a digital hub concept. At the same time, the redefining of corporate boundaries that expanded Apple’s business in a horizontal direction from the Macintosh PC business to the delivery of music, smartphones, and tablets is also an indication of the evolution of a corporate vision involving Apple’s strategic transformation. This chapter presents the strategic and creative processes that enabled practitioners, including the late Steve Jobs, to demonstrate “strategic innovation capability” by “holistic leadership” at every level of management at Apple and successfully achieve a business ecosystem strategy through “creative collaboration” across diverse boundaries within and outside the company.

This paper aims to elaborate the concepts of boundary subjects and boundary objects in constructing and communicating relevant accounting facts for managing product development (PD). Boundary subjects as reflective actors benefit effective accounting enactment, by building a shared understanding about different actors’ roles and information needs, and by helping to respond to these needs with new boundary objects.

The paper uses a longitudinal interventionist case study of a machinery manufacturer. The focus of this case study was the production ramp-up phase at the end of a PD program. Different actors’ needs were first collected and elaborated by interventionist researchers (boundary subjects). Then accounting prototypes (boundary objects) provided new means of communication.

The findings show that dealing with boundaries is crucial in accounting development. The role of boundary subjects was fundamental in the process of choosing, constructing, elaborating and communicating accounting facts. During this process, accounting prototypes integrated new accounting facts, the boundary subjects mitigated the boundaries and the boundary objects focused and restricted communication about accounting facts.

The paper tests the pragmatic constructivism approach by examining accounting enactment under uncertainty and ambiguity. The study refines pragmatic constructivism in terms of boundaries, boundary subjects as actors and boundary objects.

The intentional use of boundary subjects and objects as communication platform could push a more active inclusion of business controllers as active business partners.

The paper contributes to the literature on accounting development by highlighting the use of boundary subjects and boundary objects as fundamental mechanisms in constructing and communicating accounting facts.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the crossing of knowledge and power boundaries within a bureaucratic organization by using enterprise social media (ESM). (Carlile’s 2002) boundary crossing framework is used to guide this research.

This is a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews and observations in a large Norwegian public sector organization.

The authors find that investigating crossing knowledge and power boundaries by using ESM is problematic at syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels. ESM is used predominantly for sharing, storing and retrieving explicit knowledge, which is a display of crossing the information-processing boundary. Hence, the possibilities of shifts in formal power positions where all employees can participate on equal terms is not achieved. On the contrary, as shared meaning on how to use EMS, taking the perspective of other on how to share knowledge and thus creating new knowledge practices in EMS by overcoming these knowledge barriers is not evident. Therefore, examples of crossing the semantic and pragmatic knowledge boundaries are rarely found.

The framework could be applied to a variety of contexts to further explore the role of ESM in learning and knowledge sharing and its ability to cross power and knowledge boundaries.

This paper addresses a gap in the literature around discussions of power, trust, boundary crossing and the use of ESM for knowledge sharing and learning.

Organizational learning in higher education institutions depends upon the ability of managers and academics to maintain a flow of knowledge across the structural boundaries of the university. This paper aims to understand the boundary conditions that foster or impede the flow of knowledge during organizational change at a large public university.

Interview data were collected from 51 academics and 40 managers at the selected university. The analysis focused on two initiatives that managers sought to implement to improve organizational performance.

For one of these initiatives, managers engaged in knowledge transformation that enabled managers and academics to learn and collaborate across group boundaries. For the other initiative, managers relied on knowledge transfer practices, which failed to establish productive cross-boundary interactions to support organizational learning.

When seeking to implement new initiatives to enhance institutional performance, university managers and academics can view organizational change as a learning process that involves creating and moving knowledge across organizational boundaries. Under conditions of change, the creation and movement of knowledge may require the development of new structures and the use of communications that have a high level of media richness.

This study provides one of the first empirical investigations of knowledge sharing dynamics during organizational change in a higher education setting.

Effective project learning can prevent projects from repeating the same mistakes; however, knowledge codification is required for project-to-project learning to be up-scaled across the temporal, geographical and organisational barriers that constrain personalised learning. This paper explores the state of practice for the structuring of codified project learnings as concrete boundary objects with the capacity to enable externalised project-to-project learning across complex boundaries. Cross-domain reconceptualisation is proposed to enable further research and support the future development of standardised recommendations for boundary objects that can enable project-to-project learning at scale.

An integrative literature review method has been applied, considering knowledge, project learning and boundary object scholarship as state-of-practice sources.

It is found that the extensive body of boundary object literature developed over the last three decades has not yet examined the internal structural characteristics of concrete boundary objects for project-to-project learning and boundary-spanning capacity. Through a synthesis of the dispersed structural characteristic recommendations that have been made across examined domains, a reconceptualised schema of 30 discrete characteristics associated with boundary-spanning capacity for project-to-project learning is proposed to support further investigation.

This review makes a novel contribution as a first cross-domain examination of the internal structural characteristics of concrete boundary objects for project-to-project learning. The authors provide directions for future research through the reconceptualisation of a novel schema and the identification of important and previously unidentified research gaps.

The purpose of this paper is to coordinate the different stages involved in designing a “CSR approach” in order to visualize and analyze micro-contradictions occurring between players in a multidisciplinary team.

This intervention research project was spread over three years and conducted within an establishment for dependent elderly people (EDE).

This research extends Engeström's work to highlight the micro-contradictions identified and their nature. These micro-contradictions are reduced and investigated through mediator artifacts incorporating new knowledge.

The main limitation of the research study is that the authors were unable to completely validate Engeström's model, including the notion of instrument. The actors involved all belong to the same organization and use the same tools. This study would be worth repeating with a project team featuring actors from different organizations in order to grasp the concept of instruments used by individual actors.

On the managerial front, the authors draw managers' attention to the importance of collaborative construction of management tools, which can improve the governance of their organizations.

The originality of this paper is based on the opportunity for the long-term analysis of the relationship between potential disturbances and the generation of new knowledge during collaborative work involving a multidisciplinary team. This study is useful for this type of establishment, especially within the context of the current health crisis.

The goal of this paper is to develop and test a model that explains information and communication channel (ICC) choice for knowledge sharing in work teams.

This paper reviews relevant literature in information and knowledge sharing and communication channel choices to develop the four-layered model. From the four-layered model, an online questionnaire was developed to look at the ICCs that participants have available to them, the ICCs they actually use when sharing information in teams, and their motivations for making their ICC choices.

Although participants reported having access to a wide variety of ICCs, they tended to rely on face-to-face interactions, telephone and e-mail for sharing knowledge. In accordance with the four-layer model, participants reported that ICC choice was impacted by the type of knowledge being shared. In addition, ease of use, reliability, convenience, and the ability of the channel to document communications were all factors motivating ICC selection.

The layered model provides a framework for further research to investigate the factors at the outer layers of the four-layered model and the interaction among the layers in affecting ICC choices.

The paper attempts to build a model that organizations can use as a guide to implementing strategies for information and knowledge sharing in teams.

This paper develops and partially tests a model to understand communication choices and information sharing. It provides a framework to examine “traditional” communication choices in the midst of the uproar of the availability of Web 2.0 technologies.

In this paper, we depart from extant conceptualisations of knowledge translation mechanisms to examine projects as a way to achieve effective knowledge transfer. Our empirical analysis focused on a university–industry research project in the automotive industry.

The empirical analysis was based on a qualitative investigation. We analysed material collected within a research project involving a partnership between two universities and Fiat-Chrysler Automotive (FCA), a multi-brand auto manufacturer with a product range covering several different market segments. We used three data collection techniques: internal document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews.

Our findings show that, in a U-I research project, goals represent a key dimension to support knowledge translation. Defining the goal implies an ongoing negotiation process, where researchers and company employees work together, in order to converge towards a shared meaning of the goal. In this sense, goal orientation and goal-based interaction have significant implications for knowledge translation processes.

Studies to date have focussed on the concept of knowledge translation as a way to contextualise the transfer from the source of knowledge to the receiver and to interpret the knowledge to be exchanged. This study expands the understanding of knowledge translation mechanisms in university–industry research settings. It investigates the concept of projects as powerful knowledge translation mechanism in a dynamic and longitudinal perspective. Our contribution provides insight, reflecting on how the use of projects may represent a way to facilitate knowledge transfer and build up new ideas and solutions.

This research paper aims to examine how open innovation (OI) intermediaries facilitate knowledge collaboration between organizations and online user communities. Drawing on a Community of Practice (CoP) perspective on knowledge, the study lays out a framework of the knowledge boundary management mechanisms (and associated practices) that intermediaries deploy in enabling client organizations to engage in online community-based OI.

This research is based on an exploratory case study of an OI intermediary and 18 client organizations that engage with online user communities on the intermediary’s platform. Results incorporate both the intermediary and clients’ perspective, based on analysis of intermediary and client interviews, clients’ online community projects and other archival data.

Results reveal that OI intermediaries deploy three knowledge boundary management mechanisms – syntactic, semantic and pragmatic – each underpinned by a set of practices. Together, these mechanisms enable knowledge transfer, translation and transformation, respectively, and thus lead to cumulatively richer knowledge collaboration outcomes at the organization–community boundary. The findings show that the pragmatic mechanism reinforces both semantic and syntactic mechanisms, and is hence the most critical to achieving effective knowledge collaboration in community-based OI settings.

The findings suggest that OI intermediaries have to implement all three boundary management mechanisms to successfully enable knowledge collaboration for community-based OI. More specifically, intermediaries need to expand their focus beyond the development of digital platforms, to include nuanced efforts at building organizational commitment to community engagement.

Drawing on the CoP view, this study integrates the knowledge management literature into the OI literature to conceptualize the role of OI intermediaries in shaping knowledge collaboration between organizations and communities. In engaging with the interactive nature of knowledge exchange in such multi-actor settings, this research extends the firm-centric theorization of knowledge that currently dominates the existing OI research.