Speaker(s):   Paul Carlile (MIT/Sloan)
Title:                  Transferring, Translating and Transforming: An Integrative Framework for Managing Knowledge across Boundaries


Abstract

Organizations must establish processes for managing knowledge across boundaries because of the specialized and task-dependent forms of knowledge required to create products and services.  To address this challenge a conceptual framework is developed that identifies and integrates the value of different approaches to boundaries that are often presented as incompatible in the literature.  The development of the framework is based on two field studies in product development settings that examined what facilitated the creation of knowledge across different functional groups.  The framework describes three progressively complex boundaries: syntactic (information processing), semantic (interpretive) and pragmatic (political).  Each increasingly complex boundary requires a more complex process to facilitate the joint development of knowledge across specialized domains.  Overall, the framework categorizes types of boundaries, gauges their complexity, and then describes the processes involved in managing knowledge across each of them.  The development of a new engineering tool in an automotive firm is presented to illustrate the practical value of the framework.