Special Issue on Knowledge Integration and Innovation Processes

The issue of knowledge integration has been explored and described in the literature in many different ways and perspectives and by a significant number of authors. Knowledge integration can be seen as a process of distributed knowledge linking (Dougherty, 1992; Okhuysen & Eisenhardt, 2002) which is able to generate new value for organizations. In this vision a central activity of knowledge integration is to identify knowledge and move it from one location to another (Carlile & Rebentisch, 2003; Okhuysen & Eisenhardt, 2002). But this is not an easy task: when trying to integrate knowledge, knowledge " keepers " must overcome the barriers " to the flow and transfer of knowledge " (Scarbrough et al., 2004). This is to say that they must be able to communicate in a manner that is meaningful. Moreover, they must be able to create new knowledge. In a slightly different perspective, Carlile & Rebentisch (2003:1182-1183) suggest that knowledge integration is mainly an issue of creating new knowledge by combining knowledge from different sources and changing available knowledge " to accommodate the creation of solutions across specialised domains ". This idea of knowledge integration as " new combination " of knowledge suggests that knowledge integration could be looked at as the task of identifying how new and prior knowledge interacts and produces something new. This suggests that knowledge integration requires the construction of new knowledge by individuals relying on real-time experience, improvisation, flexibility and iterative problem-solving as a response to the situation as it emerges and unfolds (Eisenhardt & Tabrizi, 1995). In this way, the outcome of knowledge integration consists of " both the shared knowledge of