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116 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

interdependencies are not technologically determined but, rather, are charac-
teristic of the way people behave and act in designing and carrying out tasks.
For example, assembly-line workers who help each other in a lean production
‘cell’ are more task interdependent than those who do not (Wageman, 1995).
Viewed in this way, a key difference between forms of interdependence is the
degree of collaboration among the parties involved. In pooled and sequential
interdependence there is little collaboration as tasks are handed over; whereas,
in contrast, reciprocal interdependence involves continuous collaboration and
knowledge flows to and from projects. We, thus, refer to this dimension as proj-
ect interactivity as it represents the degree of interactivity between the different
linked projects.

>> RADICAL INNOVATION AND HIGH PROJECT
INTERACTIVITY

In some contexts radical innovation is the goal; that is, innovation processes
are aimed at creating very different and sometimes disruptive ways of doing
things (Christensen et al., 2000), as for example, the development of selling
music over the Internet to be downloaded to a device rather than selling CDs.
In these contexts, reciprocal interdependence (i.e. high project interactivity) is
likely to be necessary. This is because, as Carlile (2004) notes, where tasks are
knowledge-intensive and high in novelty, and where outcomes are unknown
(or unknowable) in advance (as in radical innovation), there is a need to trans-
form, and not simply transfer knowledge, across the parties involved because
knowledge boundaries will be greater. In other words, one would predict that
objectifying or ‘blackboxing’ (Scarbrough, 1995) the knowledge produced and,
so, passing it from one more or less independent project to another, in a pooled
or sequential way (e.g. simply acquiring a patent from a previous project), will
not allow for the kinds of transformation that are necessary. Rather, knowledge
produced across projects would need to be mutually constituted through a more
continuous, reciprocal form of collaboration between the parties involved. In
this sense those involved in the different projects would need to work in a trans-
disciplinary, rather than a multi-disciplinary way. Actors, thus, are required to
engage in negotiating and bargaining in order to create common rules of action,
in particular where different groups have something to lose if a practice changes,
as is the case with disruptive technologies.
This indicates that in complex project contexts, where knowledge is produced
from multiple, distributed projects, a high level of project interactivity is required
in order to manage the interdependencies and keep the innovation process mov-
ing forward, as depicted in Figure 5.2. In other words, in knowledge-intensive
domains, where innovation is characterized by relatively long, complex, systemic
and high-risk product development cycles (e.g. biomedical, aerospace), high project
interactivity needs to be the norm. However, this type of context also poses distinc-
tive challenges for the coordination of project work and knowledge integration.

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