Article ID: CBB511036761

Working at the boundary: Making space for innovation in a NASA megaproject (June 2019)

unapi

This study shows how occupational, organizational and institutional boundaries can be reworked to enable innovation. Based on an historical case study of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which spanned three decades and two dozen organizations, I show how megaproject members made boundaries a target of strategic action. Megaprojects, in particular, require us to think about boundaries at multiple levels as they commonly draw on expertise and resources from different disciplines, organizations, and institutional domains. This case reveals several mechanisms by which boundaries can be modified to coordinate diverse innovation partners, from reconfiguring the ways members relate to one another (splicing, fitting and channeling) to reshaping the environment they work in (softening, fusing and corralling). Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of how actors make room for new ideas and cause institutional change as part of innovation processes. By treating boundaries as malleable and multiplex, I extend organizational theory, which tends to view boundaries as given and things to be spanned. I extend the STS literature that takes boundaries as fluid, identifying several mechanisms of making and unmaking them. A more dynamic treatment of boundaries is called for in both innovation research and practice, and this study opens a path for research that looks not only at boundary objects but also boundary actions, and moves from boundary organizations to boundary organizing.

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Authors & Contributors
Pia Vuolanto
Susanne Brucksch
Singer, Peter A.
Jared Moore
Thorsteinsdóttir, Halla
Balmer, Andrew
Concepts
Technological innovation
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Case studies
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Boundary work
Scientific collaboration
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
20th century, late
19th century
Places
United States
Arabian peninsula
Ghana
Kenya
Japan
Finland
Institutions
Gulf Cooperation Council
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
United States. Department of Defense
Chinese Academy of Sciences
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