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letting Cell simply collapse, so they agreed a significant financial settlement with
Cell and gave them back the global marketing and sales rights for SKIN. In this way,
Cell continued the development of SKIN, albeit without the continued support of
GlobalPharma.

>> QUESTIONS

1. Describe the project ecology that is depicted by each of these cases.
2. What type of project interdependency is represented by each case?
3. What influenced the organizations involved in each case to adopt the particular
approach to managing their project interdependencies?
4. What might they have done differently to have encouraged a more successful
outcome in each case?

Summary of key learning points

>> Projects are often used to facilitate knowledge creation within organizations and they can
be successful at this (as attested by the multitude of innovative products and services that
are created by organizations) even though they can lack some of the characteristics of
psychological teams that facilitate creativity.
>> Exploiting knowledge that is created within projects can be difficult because of learning
boundaries that can exist between projects and the broader organization.

>> Most project-management methodologies include mechanisms that are aimed at facilitat-
ing knowledge exploitation from projects, but these are often not very successful.
>> Knowledge exploitation from projects can be difficult because of a deficit of collective
knowledge, because of a lack of awareness that useful knowledge is available and because
the knowledge that is available is often not very useful because it focuses on product and
not process knowledge.
>> Problems of sharing knowledge across projects are especially pertinent in contexts where
there are significant interdependencies between projects.
>> How such interdependencies are managed is often crucial to the success of an innovation
process, with high levels of project interactivity important.

>> High levels of project interactivity are often thwarted by pervasive knowledge regimes
and by inter-organizational dynamics.

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