Managing Knowledge Integration Across Boundaries

Knowledge integration - the purposeful combination of specialized and complementary knowledge to achieve specific tasks - is becoming increasingly important for organizations facing rapidly changing institutional environments, globalized markets, and fast-paced technological developments. The need for knowledge integration is driven by knowledge specialization and its geographic and organizational distribution in the global economy. The increasing complexity and relevance of the knowledge integration problem is apparent in emerging new fields of research, such as open innovation, or the merging of existing ones, e.g. organizational learning and strategy. In global competition, the successful management of knowledge integration underpins firms' ability to innovate, generate profit, grow and, ultimately, survive. This book provides conceptual contributions as well as empirical studies that examine knowledge integration essentially as a 'boundary' problem. Knowledge integration becomes a problem when boundaries between knowledge fields, and the institutions that preside over those fields, are not clear, or become fluid and contestable. This fluidity, and the competitive pressures this fluidity generates, are persistent and permanent features of the world we live in. This book put forward a consistent set of ideas, methods and tools useful to interpret, analyze and act upon the processes of knowledge integration across boundaries.

This edited book addresses two critical issues in international management: building trust and managing boundary spanning activities between international business partners. The duel-process of internationalization of multinational corporations (MNCs), through globalisation and regionalisation, has helped MNCs to increase their market expansion and improve the capabilities of innovation and learning. By creating various forms of international strategic alliances (ISAs), MNCs have become structurally more complex and geographically more dispersed. As a result, MNCs in general and ISAs in particular face the challenges of discerning blurred organisational boundaries, reconfiguring the control mechanisms, integrating diversified resources, and coordinating distributed activities in time and space. Research in organisation behaviour indicates that boundary spanners play critical yet unspecified roles and functions in managing cross-boundary relationships. A core boundary spanning function is to build trust relationships. When organisations engage in business transactions, members of the organisations are concerned with not only the outcomes of economic transactions but also the processes of social exchanges. Boundary spanners may succeed in building interpersonal trust in a partnership, nonetheless their effort may not lead to inter-partner trust without an effective implementation of the institutionalisation process. Whereas trustworthiness is the antecedent to trust providing the basis for trust to develop, distrust manifests itself as a separate and linked concept to trust. These dynamic features of trust, trustworthiness, and distrust are critically elaborated. Trust Building and Boundary Spanning in Cross-Border Management is dedicated to explicating these under-researched themes and contributing to the emerging streams of research in micro foundations and micro-structural approaches. It illustrates the latest research on the topic and will be of interest to both students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners in the fields of organisational behaviour and theory, strategic management, international strategy and strategic alliances.

As knowledge economies become increasingly important around the world, it is essential that organizations are able to transform their knowledge into a competitive advantage. This textbook offers an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge management written specifically for postgraduate students in business and management schools. Knowledge Management presents classic and advanced concepts, models and frameworks using a clear logical structure, which covers building knowledge competence, the knowledge lifecycle, and integration of knowledge management with business decision making. An overall framework illustrates links between chapters and ensures readers can gain a body of actionable knowledge rather than learning isolated, uncontextualized topics. Based on cutting-edge research findings and covering the most advanced IT and IS technologies, this book emphasises the need for knowledge management to span boundaries across organizations, supply chains and partnerships, rather than being limited to individual learning and sharing within businesses. Knowledge Management is international in scope and includes real world case studies and role play scenarios to show how theories are applied in practice, and "think back" and "critique discussion" questions to encourage reflective learning and critical thinking. This indispensable text provides a dynamic picture of the evolution of knowledge management and demonstrates its full potential to enable better business decisions. Accompanying online resources include PowerPoint slides for lecturers and exercise questions for students.

Simple problems have become rare in today’s technologically advanced world. Problems are typically much more complex, and solving them requires integrative knowledge from several disciplines. Technology alone cannot be the answer. Collaborative teams equipped with knowledge and skills in various disciplines are indispensable to exploit technologies effectively and create new conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and translational innovations that integrate and move beyond discipline-specific approaches to address a common problem in the changing and connected world. This book presents the proceedings of TE2023, the 30th International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering, held in Hua Hin Cha Am, Thailand from 11-14 July 2023. The theme of this year’s conference was Leveraging Transdisciplinary Engineering in a Changing and Connected World, and it provided a forum for more than 115 participants from academia and industry to exchange knowledge and ideas connected to this aspect of transdisciplinary engineering. A total of 117 submissions were received for the conference, of which 93 were selected for presentation and publication here following a rigorous abstract and full-paper review process. They are arranged under 7 categories: product design and development; team working; smart operations for value chain management; transdisciplinary approaches; engineering education; critical issues in transdisciplinary engineering; and theoretical contributions. Providing a comprehensive overview of the latest innovations and ideas in transdisciplinary engineering, the book will be of interest to all those working in the field.

As organizations continue to adapt and evolve to meet the challenges related to globalization and working with new collaboration technologies to bridge time and space, demands on employees’ time and attention continue to increase. Recognizing this problem and its implications, such as increased employee turnover, many companies are seeking ways to help their employees maintain a healthy balance between work and life. This book examines work-life conflict, i.e., the increasing lack of employees’ work-life balance, in the context of virtual teams and distributed work. It explores the negative impact on work-life conflict exacerbated by working across time zones, cultures, and geographical spaces. Further, it investigates specific causes of work-life conflict in distributed work environments. For researchers and practitioners in the HRM and OB domains, this book adds to the body of knowledge on work-life conflict, with a unique focus on the role of technology.

Innovation requires teaming. (Put another way, teaming is to innovation what assembly lines are to car production.) This book brings together key insights on teaming, as they pertain to innovation. How do you build a culture of innovation? What does that culture look like? How does it evolve and grow? How are teams most effectively created and then nurtured in this context? What is a leader's role in this culture? This little book is a roadmap for teaming to innovate. We describe five necessary steps along that road: Aim High, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn Fast, and Repeat. This path is not smooth. To illustrate each critical step, we look at real-life scenarios that show how teaming to innovate provides the spark that can fertilize creativity, clarify goals, and redefine the meaning of leadership.

This book aims to develop four key challenges that remain unresolved in the boundary-spanning literature, which span from the conceptual, to the practice, to the translational. In doing so, it tackles the question of boundary-spanning from four different angles, providing an in-depth investigation of the current state of the field in each of these realms, in addition to new directions for solving the identified challenges. Finally, the book synthesises the lessons from each of these challenges into a coherent and integrated final piece of the boundary dilemma. In doing so, it will provide depth and a clearer agenda for future research and practice. Crossing Boundaries in Public Policy and Management digs into the heart of enduring questions and challenges for cross-boundary working, providing in-depth conceptual contributions on the fundamental challenges of boundary work. It displays the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of public management, public policy, public administration, public-private relationships and coordination and collaboration.

Aimed at knowledge management professionals and students in the field of knowledge management and information science, this book highlights issues in organisational cultures that can impact the implementation of knowledge management. It also provides a model to identify and manage areas in the organisation that impact knowledge management.