Innovation, Research and Development Management

5Collective Expertise: Forms and Methods of Management

While managerial practices are shifting toward individualization, the importance of collective action is becoming more than ever a strategic issue for the company. Indeed, for R&D activities, which often target breakthrough innovations, the ability of people to collectively collaborate and create becomes an undeniable asset. Such collective action often requires the coordination of varied and complementary expertise, which makes it possible to deal with the complexity of the projects and missions in which R&D professionals are involved. It is therefore crucial for technology companies to be able to identify strategic processes that require collective expertise and to support actions in which specialists and experts collectively commit themselves.

In this chapter, we focus on the different forms that collective expertise can take within an organization and the different management mechanisms that can support them. In the first section, we highlight the different aspects of organizational expertise and underline the importance of its collective forms, particularly in view of increasing individualizing management practices. In the second section, we present a detailed analysis of different forms of structuring collective expertise in an R&D context, by distinguishing between interdisciplinary and monodisciplinary communities of expertise. For each of these communities, the prospects and challenges are pointed out, including ...