We celebrate a new edition of the 'Research Fridays', a series of conferences that explores questions about university research and how this knowledge is transferred to society. On this occasion the speaker is Dr. Juan Augusto Nihoul, Researcher of the SmartSociety group at La Salle Campus Barcelona, and the title of the conference is 'Understanding resilience in collaborative innovation projects'.
Despite the growing interest of both private and public sectors in fostering innovation through collaboration, many these projects struggle to achieve their objectives concerning the triple constraint and / or stakeholder´s satisfaction. Bringing together actors from diverse knowledge fields, industries, and cultures offers a fertile ground for the development of innovative products, and technologies. However, this collaborative context also presents significant managerial challenges for project partners, due to the complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty inherent in these projects. In this context, effectively managing disruptions arising from unforeseen threats becomes significant, as project´s failure becomes a likely outcome without proper response and adaptation to them.
The research's contribution is summarized through a framework that offers explanations into how a successful case (LOCUTIOS project) managed to overcome two instances of perturbations. The framework contributes to explain two different reaction patterns, characterised by different learning behaviours (adaptive or generative), governance approaches (complementarity or substitution), and role of equivocality (driver or barrier) to knowledge exploration. Achieving resilience does not follow a unique path; instead, there are (at least) two approaches distinguished by the learning behaviours of the organizations, namely generative and adaptive resilience that enable a project to overcome perturbations. The relevance of this research resides on explaining various forms of resilience within collaborative projects when confronted with unforeseen challenges, filling a gap in the literature..
Recently Dr. Juan Augusto Nihoul obtained his PhD from La Salle-URL with the thesis 'Resilience in collaborative projects' and under the direction of Dr. Francesc Miralles and Dr. Laurentiu Neamtu.