A long way home: How a corporate innovation community overcomes its political boundaries

This article focuses on the still understudied link among political boundaries and innovation practices and its inherent boundary-crossing mechanisms in corporate innovation communi-ties. Our single case study at the sports company adidas derives two particular combinations of boundaries and boundary-crossing mechanisms to overcome political boundaries in corpo-rate innovation communities. These are the ‘open-closed (minded) boundaries’ and ‘every-body-is-an-innovator boundaries’. They have been addressed with distinct innovation practic-es that comprise the boundary-crossing mechanisms ‘reframe interests’ and ‘negotiate inter-ests’. Our findings have implications for the organizational anchoring of innovation practices given its importance as enabler or barrier to overcome political boundaries in corporate inno-vation communities.