Transferring, Translating and Transforming: An Integrative Framework

Abstract

Organizations must establish processes for managing knowledge across boundaries because of the specialized and task-dependent forms of knowledge required to deliver products and services. To address this challenge an integrative framework is developed that identifies and integrates the value of different approaches to managing knowledge in organizations that are often presented as incompatible in the literature. The framework describes three progressively complex types of boundaries: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. Each increasingly complex boundary requires a more complex process to facilitate communication and innovation across specialized forms of knowledge. The framework categorizes types of boundaries, gauges their complexity, and then describes the processes involved in managing knowledge across each of them. The development of a new engineering tool in an automotive firm is presented to illustrate the conceptual strength of this framework.