Special job talk seminar
From Problem Solvers to Solution Seekers: The Co-evolving Knowledge Boundary and Professional Identity Work of
R&D Organizational Members at NASA
Speaker: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf from Harvard Business School.
The capacity to innovate has always been the Holy Grail for R&D organizations. Recently scholars have argued for shifting the locus of knowledge creation and innovation outside the boundaries of the traditional processes; naming this approach “open”, “peer production” or “distributed” innovation. Organizations are experimenting with these approaches yet there little research on how organizational members open these boundaries; shift the locus of innovation and the ensuing impact. Prior literature on knowledge, identity and professionalism predicts a fierce rejection of this approach. Through an in depth longitudinal field study of NASA’s experimentation with opening knowledge boundaries, I develop the concept of “knowledge boundary work”, capturing the change in R&D work, and illustrate the mechanism of shifting the locus of innovation as a co-evolution of knowledge boundary work and professional identity work. I find that organizational members who dismantled their knowledge boundaries expanded and even reconstructed their professional identity from “problem solvers” to “solutions seekers”. This entailed a significant transformation both in the R&D knowledge creation process and the members’ professional identity and capabilities. This enabled, in turn, further boundary dismantling. I suggest future research directions and discuss the theoretical contributions of these findings on innovation and knowledge, identity, and technology, work and organizations.
