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202 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

more effective implementation of the innovation, despite potential resistance’
(Swan and Scarbrough, 2005).

Technology and objects
Chapter 7 highlighted the pervasive role of technology, and particularly informa-
tion technology (IT), in managing knowledge. McLoughlin et al. (2000) note
further that technology, and, correspondingly, innovation involving technology,
should be seen as ‘part of a broad “socio-technical ensemble” or “network”’
(p. 19). This role of technology is especially important in networked innovation
processes where actors are distributed across knowledge/practice boundaries
(e.g. different functional groups) and organizational contexts. Technology, and
other physical artefacts, can play a critical role, both in communication and also
in acting as ‘boundary objects’ around which conversations, negotiations, deci-
sion practices and sense-making can converge. Indeed it is hard to imagine any
kind of networked innovation process that does not involve, at least to some
extent, technology.
The development of the so-called smart product, ‘Persona’, described in Box
9.4 (Fleck, 2003), provides a stark example of the mediating role of technology
in networked innovation. This prototype hand-held contraceptive device pro-
vided a material object around which producers (Unliver, Boots-the-Chemist),
users (women seeking contraception) and wider social groups (the World Health
Organization and Religious Groups) could interact and negotiate. The Persona
device – as well as its component elements (the plastic case, the test sticks, the
digital display, the Persona label and so forth) – acted as a ‘boundary object’ of
the kind discussed in Chapter 4. As Carlile (2002) found, in the case of highly
novel or innovative projects, such objects play a critical role in overcoming
boundaries created by differences in language (syntactic boundaries), meanings
(semantic boundaries) and practices (pragmatic boundaries).

BOX 9.4 The case of Persona (after Fleck, 2003)
‘Persona’ is a hand-held ‘smart device’ that, using regular urinary tests,
tells a woman when in their monthly cycle they can have sex without
getting pregnant. Essentially, it acts as a much more reliable (claiming
to be 95 per cent reliable) version of the ‘rhythm method’ and, as such,
has become popular with groups of women that, for medical or religious
reasons, cannot use other forms of contraception. Persona, for example,
received official endorsement from the Roman Catholic Church. The
design of Persona involved a number of key groups with rather different
interests, including users. In the 1970s the World Health Organiza-
tion, interested in lowering high birth rates in developing countries, was

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