Dynamics of Knowledge Integration in a Project Network

Recently, there has been a tendency in many industries to form collaborative projects with the objective of creating value for customers. Flow of resources, especially knowledge, is quite common among actors of a project network. However, disparate knowledge has to be integrated in the network in order to accomplish project objectives. Due to the paucity of literature on how the actors of a project network integrate their specialized knowledge; this study undertakes the task of examining the process of knowledge integration in a large project network. Based on the existing literature, a conceptual framework for knowledge integration was developed and, subsequently, a longitudinal study of a large network was designed to observe the phenomenon. The study revealed interesting insights into the dynamics of knowledge integration by suggesting that knowledge identification is an important subprocess and how it influences the later subprocesses of knowledge integration.