Working on technology : a study on collaborative R&D work in industrial chemistry

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Volume Title

School of Business | Doctoral thesis (monograph) | Defence date: 2008-12-01
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Date

2008

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Major/Subject

Organisaatiot ja johtaminen
Organization and Management

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Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

218 s.

Series

Acta Universitatis oeconomicae Helsingiensis. A, 335

Abstract

This study investigates collaborative R&D work in chemistry. The main purpose is to increase understanding on innovation work and particularly to find out how R&D professionals develop laboratory inventions into industrial technological applications in a collaborative action in the context of chemistry. The study approaches this main research question through an empirical case study from four different perspectives. First, it examines the types of social dynamics that are involved in collaborative R&D work. Second, it analyses the role and meaning of experimentation in the development of a chemical technology. Third, it studies how chemistry professionals analyze information in different physical settings and transform this information from one physical setting to another in a chemical scale-up process. And fourth, it explores how participants in R&D collaboration relate to time and deal with time. The findings of this study warn for undermining the challenges related to innovation work and show that turning chemical inventions into industrial applications is not a simple matter of automatic transfer of technology from laboratory to industry. Instead, it is a complex process, which requires collaboration, learning-in-working, and time. In this respect, the study specifies the dynamics within those communities where R&D professionals work on technological innovation. The results then invite us to challenge our typical image of communities as coherent places of work and think about the antecedents and consequences of the community dynamics instead. Beside the social dimension of work, this study also takes seriously the importance of the physical setting where the working takes place. With this regard, the results contribute to discussion on learning-in-working and elaborate seeing as a critical form of sensible knowledge that chemistry professionals use as they work in and move between different R&D environments. Finally, the results also suggest that R&D professionals play different kinds of time games as they attempt to develop technological innovations and show how they involve their collaborators in these time games.

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Supervising professor

Lilja, Kari, professor

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Citation

Permanent link to this item

https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-488-284-2

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[diss] Kauppakorkeakoulu / BIZ