Sustaining and Developing Disciplinary Expertise in Project-Based Organizations

CHAPTER

1

INTRODUCTION

Interdisciplinary project teams are extensively used in many firms’ R&D activities. One chief reason, looking back at the now quite extensive body of literature on project organization and management, is that projects allow firms to combine and integrate different disciplinary domains of knowledge in an efficient way (e.g., Sydow, Lindkvist, & DeFillippi, 2004). Firms that strive to be innovative are dependent on deep and up-to-date knowledge within various disciplinary domains, and project-based organizing in the form of interdisciplinary and co-located project teams has grown in importance as a way to achieve collaboration and integration across disciplinary boundaries. By some, this way of organizing work is ...