Configuring a Shared Temporal Trajectory: The Temporal Embeddedness of Collaborative Innovation

Abstract

Studies of collaborative innovation processes tend to hold a unidirectional view of time in showing how actors pursue a shared future. Pursuing a temporal view of organisations as a trajectory of events, I report the findings of a longitudinal ethnographic field study, showing how actors connected back and forth between their respective pasts and futures in order to pursue a shared future. The findings reveal how actors initially pursued one future projection, switched to pursuing another projection, and eventually abandoned the emerging shared trajectory. I develop a model from the analysis that explains the interplay of five different modes of connecting past, present, and future, describing the becoming of a shared trajectory as a process of ‘temporal abduction’. The findings contribute to an understanding of the temporality of collaborative innovation processes, and interorganisational relations more generally.