A dinâmica das práticas colaborativas para a criação de conhecimento em projetos conjuntos de pesquisa e desenvolvimento: um estudo de caso na indústria de semicondutores

Abstract

The study of collaborative practices of knowledge creation in collaborative projects of research and development is particularly relevant when considering intensive- knowledge industry projects such as the semiconductor in the case of the project of the FD-SOI 28nm transistor, developed in the microelectronics cluster in Grenoble, France. The evidence demonstrated in the literature on the characteristics of knowledge creation do not attack the practices experienced by actors that facilitate this process. Thus, the dynamics of collaborative practices cannot be sufficiently explained by the existing theoretical perspectives, being a black box for the study of inter-organizational relationships. In this work, we sought to understand how the dynamics of collaborative practices of knowledge creation in collaborative projects of R&D occur, from the meaning that project participants attach to their experiences. In this research, we developed a substantive contribution to explain the dynamics of collaborative practices of knowledge creation, which aims at contributing to increase the relational view, as well as the knowledge creation theory by using methodological procedures of grounded theory as well as narrative and temporal maps, in a single case study, taking a procedural approach of qualitative and analitycal nature. To make this possible, we recovered the history of the development of a collaborative project which begins in basic research and extends to the experimental product development. In this study, the story of the collaborative project developed over the last 15 years (1999-2014) was described, according to actors who collaborated in the creation of the FD-SOI 28nm transistor. So, from the data analysis, it was possible to provide a pragmatic description of the contextual conditions responsible for the emergence of a set of collaborative practices used in the project. This procedural description, plus the identification of collaborative practices for knowledge creation, allowed the understanding of the dynamics of collaborative practices in joint R&D projects, which is the greatest originality of this study. Among the main findings of the research, it’s the understanding that the various collaborative practices tend to aggregate different types of knowledge to the project, thus ensuring a dynamic synthesis between tacit and explicit knowledge. It was also recognized that the type of collaborative practice adopted in a joint R&D project varies according to the stock of knowledge required to make the concept real, and according to the knowledge creation strategy, adopted at each stage of the collaborative R&D project. This study allowed us to confirm the thesis that the collaborative practices of knowledge creation in joint R&D projects in the semiconductor industry are fundamental to the creation of inter-organizational knowledge. We hope that the findings of this study will increase awareness of the management of collaborative projects of R&D in the semiconductor industry, and it is expected that these results will generate government and social reflections and new academic contributions on creating inter-organizational knowledge.