The pragmatic cycle of knowledge work: Unlocking cross-domain collaboration in open innovation spaces

Abstract

Collaborating is increasingly characterized by working across domains and organizations. Teams rapidly form and dissolve, actors and settings frequently change, yet most academic research focuses on stable organizations and team configurations with familiar domains. This leads to the question: how do people successfully collaborate across domains and organizations in circumstances where there is little shared knowledge? We explored this question within the nascent digital health sector when Hacking Health—a non-profit organization—used an open innovation approach to bring together actors from different domains and organizations in temporary spaces to spur new collaborations. We found that actors faced many challenges and engaged in four interconnected types of knowledge work to address them: exploring, complementing, mapping, and modeling. This article reveals how Hacking Health’s open innovation approach used different kinds of temporary spaces to progressively orient actors in their knowledge work to develop sustainable collaborations to create digital health solutions.