02136nam a2200193 4500 509464 509464 190509b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d Lifshitz-Assaf, Hila 5306 Dismantling Knowledge Boundaries at NASA: The Critical Role of Professional Identity in Open Innovation 2018 p.746-782. Using a longitudinal in-depth field study at NASA, I investigate how the open, or peer-production, innovation model affects R&D professionals, their work, and the locus of innovation. R&D professionals are known for keeping their knowledge work within clearly defined boundaries, protecting it from individuals outside those boundaries, and rejecting meritorious innovation that is created outside disciplinary boundaries. The open innovation model challenges these boundaries and opens the knowledge work to be conducted by anyone who chooses to contribute. At NASA, the open model led to a scientific breakthrough at unprecedented speed using unusually limited resources; yet it challenged not only the knowledge-work boundaries but also the professional identity of the R&D professionals. This led to divergent reactions from R&D professionals, as adopting the open model required them to go through a multifaceted transformation. Only R&D professionals who underwent identity refocusing work dismantled their boundaries, truly adopting the knowledge from outside and sharing their internal knowledge. Others who did not go through that identity work failed to incorporate the solutions the open model produced. Adopting open innovation without a change in R&D professionals’ identity resulted in no real change in the R&D process. This paper reveals how such processes unfold and illustrates the critical role of professional identity work in changing knowledge-work boundaries and shifting the locus of innovation. - Reproduced. Organisations 5307 Knowledge management 5308 Professional identity 5309 NASA 5310 Administrative Science Quarterly Scientific innovations ddc AR 0 0 ddc 0 0 383407 IIPA IIPA 2019-05-09 63(4), Dec, 2018: p.746-782. AR119639 2019-05-09 AR