Not All Claps and Cheers

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4.3   Laughing out loud

How humor shapes innovation processes within and across organizations

Marcel Bogers, Alexander Brem, Trine Heinemann, and Elena Tavella

Introduction

Innovation processes increasingly rely on the collaboration between different stakeholders across various boundaries, including functional, hierarchical and organizational boundaries.¹ Such boundary-crossing collaborations rely on different mechanisms, activities and boundary objects. In this paper, we explore the role of one such mechanism, namely humor, which consists of a humorous stimulus and reaction,² in collaborative innovation processes. Humor might shape those processes as it affects the social positions of and relationships between individuals. The occurrence ...