فعال کردن یکپارچه سازی دانش در پروژه "تحقیق و توسعه" رقابت در عین همکاری - مدیریت منطق متناقضی

This paper addresses the issue of how knowledge integration can be managed in coopetitive R&D projects. The findings from this study imply that knowledge integration in a coopetitive R&D project is not built on shared knowledge or a shared understanding of the content of project work but that knowledge integration is enabled by a shared understanding of the process of project work. Such understanding can be established by the use of mechanisms such as planning and process specification and presentation genres. These mechanisms support the process of knowledge integration while simultaneously putting constraints on what knowledge is exchanged and they can structure discussions when face-to-face communication takes place. The findings further suggest that, to avoid unintended knowledge leakages, individual and collective settings of project work should be clearly separated such that problem solving stays an individual activity while decision making still rests with the project team as a collective activity.

Knowledge, to an increasing extent, is distributed among firms. This implies that a single firm is rarely self-sufficient when it comes to the knowledge it needs to develop new products. Instead, to fully exploit its own resources and capabilities it has to engage in collaborative efforts with others (Arora and Gambardella, 1990 and Cassiman and Veugelers, 2002). While collaborative relationships with suppliers and customers are most common among firms that establish R&D collaboration with external partners, some of them establish collaborative R&D relationships with their competitors,1 with the purpose of accessing and integrating external knowledge (Tether, 2002 and Un et al., 2010).

In this paper, we have explored the issue of knowledge integration in coopetitive relationships with a specific focus on how various knowledge integration mechanisms balance the elements of competition and cooperation simultaneously present in such relationships. In the face of fierce competitive forces within the scope of the project, it appears reasonable to rely on impersonal and standardized knowledge integration mechanisms. However, it is important to understand both the ways in which a specific integration mechanism supports knowledge integration, the way in which it inhibits unintended knowledge leakages and the consequences it has on the process of knowledge integration. In this paper, we have shed light on those issues.