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PROJECT-BASED ORGANIZATIONS AND KNOWLEDGE WORK 113

knowledge about the process (how we do/did things) since this has a potentially
much wider relevance for others in an organization. For example, referring to
the project described above to design a new academic programme in a university.
The project members will create documents about the new programme, but are
much less likely to create documents that articulate what worked well and what
worked less well in terms of the actual processes they used to get to the point of
being able to create the new programme – whether they started with too big/
small a group, whether the division of tasks was effective, whether the frequency
of meetings was adequate and so on.
In the chapter to this point we have stressed the problems of sharing knowl-
edge from projects to the wider organization. In reality, the problem is actually
even more acute than this, because actually the sharing of knowledge will often
require inter-organizational sharing and will often involve not merely ‘nice to
transfer’ types of knowledge but essential transfer to keep an innovation process
going. We turn to this next.

>> DIFFERENT TYPES OF PROJECT CONTEXT
Existing research on project-based organizing assumes that projects have certain
characteristics. In particular, they are described as relatively autonomous, with
project work being more or less detached from the history and context of the
host organization (Hobday, 2000); indeed we examined this issue above in rela-
tion to the learning boundaries that exist between a project and the wider orga-
nization. Thus, Engwall (2003) describes projects as ‘lonely phenomena’. From
this perspective, projects are viewed as being initiated to accomplish pre-specified
goals and objectives, within a defined period of time, and in a relatively autono-
mous way, unencumbered by established organizational routines and practice.
Indeed, it is this relative autonomy, and the degree of decision discretion that
this confers on project members, that is seen to promote innovation, by allowing
organizations to respond more flexibly and speedily to external demands and to
work across organizational and disciplinary boundaries (even though, as we have
seen, this can also make it difficult to exploit knowledge created from a project
more widely across an organization). This emphasis on project autonomy has
led researchers to focus on how to organize and manage work within projects
and project teams – that is at a project level of analysis – seeing projects as an
important locus for knowledge creation and innovation.
However, it is now being recognized that single, stand-along projects are not
the only type of project-context. Thus, Desouza and Evaristo (2004) recently
distinguished between three types of project, other than the traditional single
project:

1. Projects that are part of a co-located programme; here multiple projects
run concurrently at one location. For example, designing a new car typically
involves multiple projects that each work on a different part of the design. Tra-
ditionally, this work has been done at the development site of a car company,

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