Objects as Means of Sustainability Knowledge Co-Creation Across the Research-Practice Boundary

Abstract

Tackling grand challenges calls for a systemic view that highlights opportunities for knowledge and solution co-creation between researchers and practitioners. To explore how objects help to bridge the research-practice gap, this empirical study brings together various actor groups – academics, practitioners, and consumers –, two knowledge-sharing objects in the textile and fashion sector, and co-creation activity in the context of sustainability knowledge transformation. Our findings show that objects can actively support knowledge co-creation across the research-practice boundary. In doing so, they shed light on three dimensions in the use of sustainability knowledge-sharing objects: emotions and identity threat, object incompleteness, and temporality. We contribute to three combined literature sets on boundary objects, grand challenges, and co-creation. First, objects help to materially ground researcher-practitioner interactions by inscribing insights from each knowledge domain as part of a process of knowledge co-creation. Second, specific object form features contribute to both simplify and address a system-level problem. Third, our findings suggest that while promising means of diffusing sustainability knowledge to practice, the imperfection of the co-created boundary objects necessitated by the fast tempo of the world of practice, evokes negative emotions in, and poses an identity threat to, academics participating in co-creation.