Dynamics of couplings and their implications in inter-organizational multi-actor research and innovation projects

Publicly funded multi-actor research, development and innovation projects are a setting where a network of multiple organizational actors form a temporary consortium to jointly create new knowledge and market-upstream innovations. The couplings between the organizational actors and sub-groups of these actors represent joint work that leads to flows of knowledge and flows of activities. The dynamics of the couplings in this empirical context and their implications are not well understood yet. Using an inductive comparative multiple case study of projects funded in European Research and Innovation Programmes, we investigated 4 projects with 54 organizational actors, which produced 50 innovations. The evolutions of all couplings went through the same phases, although the temporality of the phases differed. We identified eight types of evolutions of couplings and their underlying generative mechanisms. These evolutions led to different, mostly negative implications on the planned collaborative innovations. Particularly, we observed a systematic degradation of the couplings that were planned to connect sub-groups of organizational actors. Over time, the projects became less collaborative than planned, and they have a tendency to fragment into isolated activities by subgroups of actors. Based on these findings, we propose an emerging process model which helps to better understand how and why the couplings evolve in multi-actor RDI projects.