A practice-oriented approach to overcome knowledge-sharing boundaries in innovation projects

Boundaries of understanding and boundaries of interests have in common that they seriously hinder collaboration of coworkers. This chapter proposes an alternative approach, focusing on implementing innovation practices that support teams to create shared understanding and to deliberately alter their individual team members' interests in order to create shared ones. It explores the nature of different types of knowledge-sharing boundaries in innovation projects with a diverse set of internal and external parties. Innovation practices are all methods, tools, strategies, and concepts that are implemented to support the progress of innovation projects. The chapter presents a four-stage self-assessment tool, which enables those who are involved in innovation projects to efficiently and effectively identify and resolve knowledge-sharing boundaries. The self-assessment questionnaire may be applied in a normative way because it helps users to decipher observed behavior and boundary types.