Boundary Spanning Challenges in a Co-Creative Enterprise: Lesson from Social Problem-Solving Collaborations

Boundary spanning functions have been well-documented in management literature, with the field of marketing, especially sales management, services marketing, customer relationship management and product development, having realized the importance of boundary-spanning elements. The chapter examines boundary spanning challenges in the era of company—customer collaboration, or co-creation. It has been found that when organizations with distinctly complementary capabilities come together, the chances of success are the highest. It is this complementary nature of capabilities for successful collaborations that has led to increasing interest in customers being coopted into various collaborative efforts by marketing organizations. The chapter draws analogy of co-creation with a specific type of collaboration, the cross-sector collaboration—involving nonprofits with corporate entities—in terms of partnership formation activities, implementation activities and outcomes of such partnerships. It is also posited here that frameworks provided by the cross-sector collaboration are relevant in providing important insights into the boundary spanning challenges in a co-creative enterprise. The chapter links cross-sector collaboration with co-creation and boundary spanning functions and proposes research questions that can be empirically tested. The chapter studies various models of cross-sector collaborations and selects one such framework, the social problem-solving collaboration, for its applicability in the context of the co-creative enterprise. It distils lessons from research on such collaborative efforts and discusses the implications for research and practice. The insights drawn from studies of cross-sector collaboration have significance in terms of understanding the ecosystem of a co-creative enterprise. Organizations fostering customer co-creation have to deal with challenges of new boundary spanning roles and this can be explained using social problem-solving collaborations. This framework is important from the perspective of the practice of company-customer collaborations in the future. It provides important insights into where and how to intervene to move companies and customers toward co-creation relationships.