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The paper examines managing knowledge across boundaries in settings where innovation is desired. Innovation is a useful context because it allows us to explore the negative consequences of the path-dependent nature of knowledge. A framework is developed that describes three progressively complex boundaries-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic-and three progressively complex processes-transfer, translation, and transformation. The framework is used to specify the practical and political mismatches that occur when innovation is desired and how this relates to the common knowledge that actors use to share and assess each other's domain-specific knowledge. The development and use of a collaborative engineering tool in the early stages of a vehicle's development is presented to illustrate the conceptual and prescriptive value of the framework. The implication of this framework on key topics in the organization theory and strategy literatures is then discussed.
Key words: knowledge; innovation; path dependence; power; boundary management; product development
1. Introduction
Dorothy Leonard's (1995) statement that most innovation happens at the boundaries between disciplines or specializations tells us that working across boundaries is a key ingredient of competitive advantage, but also why innovation proves so difficult to create and maintain. The growing research on knowledge in organizations underscores this challenge by recognizing first the "knowledge boundaries" (Brown and Duguid 2001) between specialized domains and second that knowledge is "both a source of and a barrier to innovation" (Carlile 2002, p. 442). In this paper the topic of boundaries in organization theory will be reexamined from a perspective of managing knowledge across boundaries in settings where innovation is desired.
This focus on innovation will help to extend the conversation of boundary management from its classic starting point of information processing (Lawrence and Lorsch 1967, Galbraith 1973) and beyond its more contemporary focus on coordination (Malone and Crowston 1994, Gittell 2001). This examination will provide analytic descriptions of the varying circumstances possible at boundaries and the processes involved in managing knowledge across them. This effort will help resolve the incompatibility between three different perspectives of boundaries: an information processing approach that focuses on knowledge as a thing to store and retrieve, an interpretive approach that emphasizes the importance of a common meaning to share knowledge between actors, and a political approach that acknowledges how different interests impede knowledge...