The Evolution of Collaboration in Multi-actor R&D Projects: Patterns of Couplings and Innovations

Abstract

Multi-actor R&D projects are a setting where a network of multiple organizational actors, usually from research and industry, creates a temporary consortium and are funded based upon a proposal to jointly develop new knowledge and innovations. The couplings between the organizations are designed in the proposal, however based on incomplete knowledge. Using a comparative multiple case study of multi-actor projects funded in European Research and Innovation Programs, we investigate why and how these planned couplings, i.e. the collaborations between organizations evolved during the different project phases and what effect this had on the collaborative innovations. We investigated 4 projects with 54 organizations generating 46 innovations, using data from over 740 pages of documentation and over 33 hours of semi-structured interviews with 24 project actors. The study uncovers eight types of reconfigurations of couplings, activated by six disintegrative and two integrative mechanisms. Most of these reconfigurations led to negative consequences for innovations or to innovations created by less partner organizations. The weakening of couplings was much less pronounced within specialized modules (subgroups of closely collaborating partners) within the projects than at the interfaces that were planned to connect the modules. Here, planned strong couplings often degraded into weak couplings or even disappeared over the project lifetime. Based on these findings, we propose a process model of the evolution of couplings in multi-actor R&D projects and implications on collaborative innovations.