Managing Inter-Organizational Boundary Spanning in Collaborative Innovation.

Despite the touted benefits of embracing collaborative innovation, organizations continue to face the challenge of benefiting from it. The crux of the issue moves beyond whether to embrace collaborative innovation towards how to integrate knowledge across organizational boundaries for innovation performance. This research draws from the boundary spanning view and the IT capability literature to explore this issue. We conceptualize coordination roles as boundary spanners, inter-organizational systems usage as boundary objects, as well as inter-organizational task interdependence as boundary spanning process characteristic. We examine how the boundary spanners and boundary objects as well as their interaction effects with boundary spanning process influence inter-organizational knowledge integration, which consequently determines the collaborative innovation performance. This research-in-progress advances understanding of how organizations benefit from collaborative innovation, depending on the inter-organizational knowledge integration across boundaries. An appreciation of the boundary spanning mechanisms will help organizations mindfully manage collaborative innovation projects in future endeavors.