An exploration of knowledge creation processes in Open Innovation

Abstract

This study examined the creation of knowledge in two embedded cases of Open Innovation (OI) in a complex technological setting. The study focused on the role of boundaries in knowledge flow and knowledge creation and sought to understand how boundaries shape the trajectory of an OI project. While the OI literature is well-developed, most studies are at the level of the organisation and have examined instances of innovation, rather than longitudinal OI processes. In addition, most have taken a cognitive view of knowledge in theorising OI, which can result in an overly simplified understanding of how agents from different knowledge domains achieve sufficient mutual understanding to create new knowledge. For this reason, I took the novel approach of using a practice-based view of knowledge as the theoretical lens through which to explore knowledge creation, to generate a richer theorisation of knowledge creation in OI projects.In line with this practice-based perspective, the study took a qualitative research approach and used ethnographic methods to collect data over seventeen months, thereby enabling novel insights not available from elsewhere in the literature. The first case examined involved the development of a new diagnostic practice for detecting pre-cancerous changes in human cells in-vivo, using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and was at a mature stage of technological development. The second case involved applying the MRS technology developed in the first case, to create a novel diagnostic practice for detecting a mental health condition and was at an early phase of development.The study identified three types of practices involved in knowledge creation: project-specific practices, occupation-specific practices and framework practices. Distinguishing between the practices involved in overcoming knowledge boundaries enabled a detailed theorisation of the processes involved. Differences between agents’ occupation-specific practices (knowledge boundaries), rather than organisational boundaries, impacted the OI projects and caused interruptions that stopped project progress. Each of the three practice types played a specific role in enabling knowledge creation by the agents, who co-developed project-specific practices to overcome their knowledge boundaries. Agents embedded the new project-specific knowledge created, in each case study, into the new or modified project-specific practices.To explicate these findings, I argue that the interruptions to progress in the OI projects due to knowledge boundaries, caused the agents to shift from a state of absorbed coping to one of theoretical detachment. In that state, the agents had the opportunity to self-distanciate, a known precursor activity for knowledge creation, and from that state, to co-create new project-specific knowledge. This process was repeated each time an interruption was encountered, resulting in the accumulation of new knowledge over time as the knowledge creation process unfolded. As successive knowledge boundaries were overcome, agents embedded the increments of project-specific knowledge created into project-specific practices and project-specific objects, with the result that these practices and objects co-evolved over time. Thus, repeated interruptions over time created knowledge cumulatively. I theorised this phenomenon, which has not previously been reported, as practice maturation. I articulated this relationship between interruptions and the cumulative creation of new project-specific knowledge in a proposed processual model of knowledge creation. The finding that repeated interruptions over time created knowledge cumulatively and this relationship between interruptions and cumulative knowledge creation findings, enabled conceptualising an OI project as a continuous, iterative process of individual agents overcoming their mutual knowledge boundaries through a process of self-distanciation, induced by the interruptions they encountered, to create new shared practices and objects. I therefore argue that an OI project is a situated and ongoing process of project-specific knowledge creation and that it is practice maturation that enables an OI project to progress.The study’s main contributions to the Knowing-in-practice literature include the identification of three types of practice enacted to create new project-specific knowledge; the novel concept of practice maturation; the identification of interruptions caused by knowledge boundaries as an alternative means of bringing about self-distanciation, and the repeated encountering and overcoming of knowledge boundaries to cumulatively create knowledge over time, as articulated in the processual model of knowledge creation presented. The study contributes to the OI literature by demonstrating that OI project processes are considerably more complex than how they are portrayed in the dominant OI literature, and by drawing attention to the significant role of knowledge boundaries in knowledge creation involving agents from different knowledge domains. Further, the study highlights the constructive role of interruptions that are otherwise often perceived as evidence that something is ‘wrong’ with an OI project. Finally, the study provides an alternative conceptualisation of OI to the accepted understanding, by identifying the different types of practices involved in it and the role of each in co-creation.