Call for Papers
Innovation, Knowledge Integration and Path Dependence –
Towards More Reflective Practices
31th EGOS Colloquium, Sub-theme 35
2.-4. Juli 2015; Athens, Greece
Convenors: Jörg Sydow, Christian Bergren, Robert DeFillippi
Knowledge integration is necessary for innovating products, processes and institutions, in private as well as public sectors. Typically, it is not sufficient to get access to new or complementary knowledge, with the help of a strategic alliance, licensees or mergers. Rather it is necessary to combine and integrate stocks and flows of knowledge with the help of (inter-) organizational arrangements.
Going beyond such a governance perspective on organizations and interorganizational arrangements, the subtheme aims to explore how actual practices help or hinder the integration of diverse sets of knowledge. And going also beyond firms with strong R&D capabilities, that are typically at the centre of such inquiry, effective knowledge integration practices will be studied in not only in private but also public sectors, from sophisticated crime investigations seeking to make use of an ever increasing menu of advanced detection technologies to international relief and emergency operations.
The focus on knowledge integration practices with its emphasis on sociomaterial detail and inand outflows complements extant research on open innovation, absorptive capacity, R&D alliances, and organizational and network learning. Although not exclusively, we wish to concentrate on the tensions and contradictions between novelty and path dependence; no matter whether the latter is rooted in technological, institutional or organizational arrangements or – like in regional clusters – a mixture of all three. In all these cases, path dependencies are likely to hinder the absorption and integration of new knowledge which is required for innovation; sometimes making the breaking of an established path or the even the creation of a new path necessary.
The sub-theme particularly invites contributions that focus on one or more of the following issues, more or less addressing the intersection of innovation, knowledge integration and path dependence:
- Organizing for knowledge integration practices in open innovation processes
- Knowledge absorption and integration in rapidly developing firms in emerging economies
- Combining and integrating extremely diverse knowledge for radical innovations
- Sociomaterial practices of knowledge integration for incremental innovations
- Organizational/institutional path dependence as a barrier to knowledge integration
- Path dependence of knowledge accumulation processes in and among organizations
- Interplay of power and path dependence in knowledge integration processes
- Knowledge integration practices in public sector organizations
- Organizational and network learning perspectives on knowledge integration
- Capturing reflexivity in knowledge integration processes
- Indicators of knowledge integration, qualitative and quantitative methods forempirical studies beyond patent data.
Papers that discuss such issues, and possibly others, empirically or conceptually, with regard to recent or more historical developments, are cordially invited.
Deadline for the submission of short papers: 12.1.2015
Further information