Boundary-Spanning Knowledge Sharing

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 puts forward a consistent set of ideas, methods and tools useful to interpret, analyze and act upon the processes of knowledge integration across boundaries.

Inovar, esse é o imperativo, o fator que pode garantir a sobrevivência de uma empresa num mercado definitivamente incerto e agressivamente competitivo. Mas como inovar senão construindo a partir dos próprios colaboradores da empresa aquilo que pode vir a ser seu diferencial?
A gestão do conhecimento parte do princípio de que todo o saber existente em uma empresa é composto não só daquele que pulsa no interior de seus diversos departamentos ou daquele que percorre as interconexões dos diferentes processos, mas também, e principalmente, daquele que existe na cabeça das pessoas.

Essa é a nova perspectiva, a gestão estratégica desse conhecimento, uma filosofia gerencial que procura organizar esse conteúdo latente de modo a transformá-lo em vantagem competitiva para as instituições. Esta ação exige não apenas conhecimento do negócio, mas um intenso desenvolvimento das relações interpessoais, acuidade na visão estratégica e verdadeira prontidão para mudanças, tendo sempre em mente que aprender a aprender é tão importante quanto o que é aprendido.





, ,, Innovation and Knowledge Management, Sistemas De Innovación, Transferencia Tecnológica, Redes De Conocimiento

Background: Relatively little is known about how people and groups who function in boundary-spanning positions between different sectors, organisations and professions contribute to improved quality of health care and clinical outcomes.

Objectives: To explore whether or not boundary-spanning processes stimulate the creation and exchange of knowledge between sectors, organisations and professions and whether or not this leads, through better integration of services, to improvements in the quality of care.

Design: A 2-year longitudinal nested case study design using mixed methods.

Setting: An inner-city area in England (‘Coxford’) comprising 26 general practices in ‘Westpark’ and a comparative sample of 57 practices.

Participants: Health-care and non-health-care practitioners representing the range of staff participating in the Westpark Initiative (WI) and patients.

Interventions: The WI sought to improve services through facilitating knowledge exchange and collaboration between general practitioners, community services, voluntary groups and acute specialists during the period late 2009 to early 2012. We investigated the impact of the four WI boundary-spanning teams on services and the processes through which they produced their effects.

Main outcome measures: (1) Quality-of-care indicators during the period 2008–11; (2) diabetes admissions data from April 2006 to December 2011, adjusted for deprivation scores; and (3) referrals to psychological therapies from January 2010 to March 2012.

Data sources: Data sources included 42 semistructured staff interviews, 361 hours of non-participant observation, 36 online diaries, 103 respondents to a staff survey, two patient focus groups and a secondary analyses of local and national data sets.

Results: The four teams varied in their ability to, first, exchange knowledge across boundaries and, second, implement changes to improve the integration of services. The study setting experienced conditions of flux and uncertainty in which known horizontal and vertical structures underwent considerable change and the WI did not run its course as originally planned. Although knowledge exchanges did occur across sectoral, organisational and professional boundaries, in the case of child and family health services, early efforts to improve the integration of services were not sustained. In the case of dementia, team leadership and membership were undermined by external reorganisations. The anxiety and depression in black and minority ethnic populations team succeeded in reaching its self-defined goal of increasing referrals from Westpark practices to the local well-being service. From October to December 2010 onwards, referrals have been generally higher in the six practices with a link worker than in those without, but the performance of Westpark and Coxford practices did not differ significantly on three national quality indicators. General practices in a WI diabetes ‘cluster’ performed better on three of 17 Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) indicators than practices in the remainder of Westpark and in the wider Coxford primary care trust. Surprisingly, practices in Westpark, but not in the diabetes cluster, performed better on one indicator. No statistically significant differences were found on the remaining 13 QOF indicators. The time profiles differed significantly between the three groups for elective and emergency admissions and bed-days.

Conclusions: Boundary spanning is a potential solution to the challenge of integrating health-care services and we explored how such processes perform in an ‘extreme case’ context of uncertainty. Although the WI may have been a necessary intervention to enable knowledge exchange across a range of boundaries, it was not alone sufficient. Even in the face of substantial challenges, one of the four teams was able to adapt and build resilience. Implications for future boundary-spanning interventions are identified. Future research should evaluate the direct, measurable and sustained impact of boundary-spanning processes on patient care outcomes (and experiences), as well as further empirically based critiques and reconceptualisations of the socialisation→externalisation→combination→internalisation (SECI) model, so that the implications can be translated into practical ideas developed in partnership with NHS managers.

Funding: The National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme.

Boundary spanning work is important for both public, non-profit and private organizations to stay relevant to the environment, to collaborate, to innovate and to perform better. It is remarkable, though, that comprehensive understanding on the behavior and role of boundary spanners is underdeveloped, especially given the strong push for more cross-boundary collaboration and cooperation in the public sector. This book provides a coherent overview of the state of the art on boundary spanners. Building on an interdisciplinary and systematic review of the literature, it discusses different theoretical perspectives on boundary spanners, describes different types of activities and profiles of boundary spanners, assess different factors influencing the work of boundary spanners and discuss the impact of boundary spanners on different types of outcomes (collaboration, trust, organizational innovation). Including empirical illustrations, and discussing a broad range of literature, methods and approaches used in research on boundary spanning, this book aims to be appealing for students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in cross-boundary work.

This article examines the impact of two facilitating conditions for boundary-spanning behaviour in urban governance networks. While research on boundary spanning is growing, there is little attention for antecedents. Combining governance network literature on project management and organizational literature on facilitative and servant leadership, we examine two potential conditions: a facilitative project management style and executive support. We conducted survey research among project managers involved in urban governance networks in order to test these relationships. We found positive relationships between facilitative project management and boundary-spanning behaviour, while executive support indirectly, via facilitative management, contributed to boundary-spanning behaviour.

Resources added to the global metal inventory through exploration over the past 15 years have been generally of poor quality (declining grades, recoveries and lack of acceptable financial return). Similarly, companies opting for an acquisitions-based strategy have had to pick from a group of poorer quality resources left from previous exploration booms, and will struggle to deliver this metal to market economically. Increasing difficulty in obtaining sufficient social and community acceptance of mining projects and potentially an energy-constrained future may exacerbate this problem, redefining what is considered 'ore'. There will need to be more focus on deposit quality, defined as sustainable margin in the future business environment.

Healthcare (HC) utilizes informatics to provide its services through information technology (IT)
where social network initiative aid medical decision-making (DM) quality through sharing of
knowledge during participatory behavior between members of a healthcare (HC) virtual
community of practice (VCoP). Even though, HC is globally expensive and complex, it still
suffers from frequently occurring medical errors caused by poor DM. This research explored
knowledge management (KM) processes (in particular knowledge sharing quality) and medical
DM quality, upon a Web 2.0 platform, to propose a conceptual framework that is driven by
literature. Traditional and up-to-date theoretical, empirical and case study-based literaturereview
has been thoroughly analyzed to support these inter-relationships between the two main
theoretical constructs: knowledge sharing quality and medical DM quality. As a result the finding
of this study reported a proposition depicted by a conceptual framework, i.e. knowledge sharing
quality has the potential to facilitate a positive impacting role on medical DM quality. This study
adds value to the large body of intellectual knowledge by enhancing the conception of medical
DM quality to improve HC quality. Research still lacks in the area of medical DM. This research
has introduced a new avenue upon which HC quality can be improved by reducing medical
errors, from the perspective of medical DM quality and knowledge sharing quality on in Web 2.0
e-health social media platform.
Keywords – Virtual Community of Practice; Social Media; Social Networking, Healthcare
Knowledge Management, Knowledge sharing quality.
Paper type – Literature review.

In this present economy that is wholly centered on knowledge and skill, knowledge sharing (KS) is gradually regarded as an important factor in organizational effectiveness and an innovative mechanism to cope with challenges [1]. Therefore, for organizations to create new knowledge sharing strategies are essentials to align to the knowledge economy to overcome business challenges [2, 3]. A preliminary investigation was conducted by focusing on the Critical Success Factors (CSF) to promote knowledge sharing at the organizational level and to examine the employees' perception towards the types of knowledge sharing tools in the construction trading industry. This paper proposes several dimensions for knowledge strategy to manage knowledge assets that can be used as the key foundation to many organizations to stay competitive especially the construction trading industry.

For 40 years, economic, social, and cultural factors such as advanced technology and globalization have changed how cities compete to attract new citizens. A city’s proximity to natural resources is no longer the driver of its competitive advantage. Instead, a city’s ability to attract, develop and retain talent (the people who will live and work there) is the greatest predictor of social, and economic prosperity. That means how cities grow and develop their talent pool is crucial. Today's workplaces demand that people have the capacity to live with uncertainty, adapt to new roles and learn new skills quickly. These skills transcend industries and professions. If there were such a thing as a defining competency, it would be adaptability. Adaptable people can adjust to the dynamic context of the world today. Adaptability can be reactive, like how many are learning to live in a new reality during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, adaptability can also be proactive and intentional, characterized by anticipating change and planning our response in advance. In this study, we explore the attributes of adaptive people and how they underpin adaptive organizations, systems, and cities. Imagine a city of people who view disruption as opportunity. Imagine a population whose talent and skills continuously evolve. Imagine a Calgary that attracts investment and talent from across the globe because it’s known as a city that learns its way forward. We don’t believe the question is if this city is the Calgary of the future. Rather, our focus is on how we will realize our potential and whether the speed of change will be fast enough to navigate the precipice we’re standing on. At the root of adaptation is learning. So to become a city that adapts, Calgary must become a city that can learn faster and better than others. How do we transform Calgary into a “LearningCITY”? We have to start by changing the learning system. We argue that how we choose to learn will define Calgary’s future social and economic prosperity. Yet the ability for today’s learning system to transform to meet emerging demands remains widely debated, because education is one of the most change-resistant institutions in society. Education is also threaded through society, not just in kindergarten to grade 12 and accredited educational institutes, but it’s also in employers, professional associations, business ecosystems and in the hands of individual learners. The ways people learn, in short, are incredibly complex. That means there’s enormous potential to effect wider change by evolving our learning system. How can Calgary’s learning system be optimized to drive social and economic prosperity in the face of accelerating uncertainty? To answer this question we conducted a multi-disciplinary study into the nature of adaptability and the learning system. This first report reviews the results of this two-phased study.

Effective workgroups engage in team boundary spanning, that is, using communication ties as conduits to critical external resources. The proliferation of enter- prise social media (ESM) and the associated increase in visibility of people, content, and interactions, has resulted in a widespread assumption that unlimited visibility improves boundary spanning. Consequently, the ESM literature has generally ignored the sentry functions of teams and failed to examine the possible strategic nature of visibility choices by ESM groups. Using log and content data from 655 ESM-based workgroups at a multinational enterprise, we contribute a deeper understanding of the distinct ways that ESM visibility—bounded or unbounded—is leveraged strategically to evoke diverse network structures, which in turn have implications for distinct boundary-spanning activities. Practically, these findings show that ESM present a unique opportunity for workgroups to simultaneously sustain multiple virtual spaces—with varying levels of visibility—through which they can manage their diverse boundary-spanning goals.

Hydraulic fracturing for shale gas is a controversial issue in most countries. In these controversies, actors use discursive boundary work to convince various audiences of their position. Discursive boundary work is a communicative strategy that involves the framing of facts in contrast to other kinds of arguments. In this article we develop the Dynamic Discourse Coalition (DDC) approach to study how discourse coalitions deploy discursive boundary work to confirm, integrate, polarize or disintegrate their own and opposing discourse coalitions. The DDC approach enables a deeper understanding of the dynamics of controversies about hydraulic fracturing and similar contested technologies by illuminating the influence of communicative processes on policy formation. Based on an analysis of policy documents, academic reports, newspapers, interviews and websites we compare the dynamics of contesting discourse coalitions in the Netherlands and New York. This analysis explains why policy formed in different ways in the cases, despite the apparent similarity of the discourse coalitions that emerged in the respective controversies.