Building knowledge for and about large‐scale organizational transformations

Abstract

Contributes a collaboration approach for achieving the goals of helping an organization transform itself and expanding the body of knowledge. To support these goals, the collaboration must meet four knowledge objectives: create, assimilate, disseminate, and apply knowledge about organizational change and transformations. Four operating principles help achieve these outcomes. Enacting three functions (i.e. technical assistance, training/education, and research) accomplish the desired goals and objectives. Within this collaboration, an applied research strategy is described with five dimensions: paradigm (i.e. action research and case study), timing (i.e. initial, ongoing, post), data sources (i.e. internal, external, and literature), data collection method, and research stage (i.e. pre, central, follow‐up). Reflection on the implementation of the approach with ongoing projects at the Kennedy Space Center provides a description of the researcher’s role and lessons learned.