Collaborative Knowledge Creation

Abstract

In many areas of work today, innovation requires a wide breadth of knowledge and skills. As a consequence, knowledge workers may no longer find themselves working alone or exclusively with members of their own knowledge specialization, but may interact with professionals from diverse disciplines to jointly create new or emergent knowledge to produce innovations. This paper focuses on the process of collaborative knowledge creation among professionals from a range of knowledge disciplines. This research draws on relational coordination theory (Gittell 2000), organization theory (Thompson 1967) and knowledge team theory (Cooke et al., 2000), and explores the role of relational coordination in creating the conditions in which collaborative knowledge creation can flourish.