How projects co-create value with stakeholders: The role of ideology and inquiry in spanning the temporary-permanent boundary

Abstract

Projects transform organisational processes as they deliver physical artefacts and spaces. Yet in the existing literature, there is relatively little attention to how project delivery professionals engage members of an organisation to co-create value. Building on research on stakeholders and organisational boundaries, an empirical study of the renewal of a large Finnish hospital is used to develop new insight into value co-creation between temporary and permanent forms of organisation. In this hospital case study, we find a framing ideology that supports value co-creation is provided by the project practitioners’ commitment to ‘service design’, and an enquiry that enrols organisational stakeholders’ participation and reveals temporal tensions at the temporary-permanent boundary. As the emergent temporal tensions are managed, ideas flow across the boundary and new artefacts and spaces are designed by the project team concurrently with, and are informed by, the implementation of new organisational processes. This study's contribution is to explain how project delivery professionals use ideology and enquiry to engage and co-create value with organisational participants.