A core problem in sustainability transitions is to ensure that actors come together and work on a common goal. Earlier research has argued that developing a project-oriented agency is essential to ensure transitions. By examining two contrasting cases, the Sustainable Transportation program and the Sustainable Hospital program, we identify two distinct types of project-oriented agency: (1) emergent and (2) induced. The former showcases an inclusive approach emphasizing open collaboration and resource mobilization, flexible goals, whereas the latter encompasses prescribed resource mobilization, contractual objectives, and deadlines. Beyond bottom-up vs. topdown dichotomies, these project-oriented agency types highlight different shaping contexts and logics of how actors mobilize projects for change. Our analysis identifies the nuanced dimensions of project-oriented agency and the impetuses, practices, and temporal structures through which they shape transition outcomes. The paper enriches the current understanding of how targeted projects and programs can bridge experimental niches with mainstream regime transformation, thereby enabling system-wide sustainability transitions.

Grand challenges call for innovation and collaboration across sectors. Yet, many cross-sector and multi-stakeholder initiatives often fall short of achieving their intended goals, and creating the expected value. Addressing this issue requires a better understanding of how to develop and design emergent multi-stakeholder programs with actual societal value. This article leverages an in-depth case study of Sweden’s High-Capacity Transport program to develop a process model that demonstrates how three interconnected value pathways—goal gearing, participatory engagement, and program leveraging—ensured the gradual expansion of program goals and of interest among diverse participants who enhanced collective value creation and contributed to the success of this multi-stakeholder collaboration.

In the context of complex and digitalized engineering projects, effectively orchestrating meta-knowledge that encompasses awareness of diverse expertise presents a significant challenge, as it requires crossing various boundaries. Situated expertise plays a critical role in this process, connecting individual or group-level meta-knowledge to wider expertise systems in projects. We report a case study exploring how group expertise boundaries influence situated expertise development in the oil and gas front-end project context. Through qualitative analysis, we underscore the role of permeable group expertise boundaries in fostering open situated expertise systems, allowing for meta-knowledge about individuals, groups, and digital technologies. This permeability is especially critical in innovative and non-contractual contexts. We identify four elements—strategy, structural design, interaction molding routines and roles, and digital boundary objects—that contribute to open situated expertise development. Our findings show that while digital boundary objects can mediate expertise boundaries by enabling communication and navigation of expertise in projects, the reach of situated expertise largely depends on interaction molding elements, particularly boundary-spanning roles. This study concludes by recommending that practitioners expand their meta-knowledge, rethink their strategic approaches to situating and utilizing expertise in projects, and carefully establish routines for using digital technologies to record and retrieve expertise.

Programs are frequently highlighted for their ability to enable the implementation of strategic transformation amidst rapidly changing and unpredictable business environments. This study explores the creation of routines within a strategic program in the Danish construction industry and the subsequent transfer of these routines to the parent organizations. It identifies three sequential patterns of action: entrenching, dis-embedding, and re-embedding routines. Through an interpretive case study, the study reveals how these routines emerge and adapt in alignment with diverse organizational capabilities and relations. The findings highlight the importance of routine transfer and integration in parent organizations, emphasizing their adaptability to distinct needs and their significance for achieving strategic objectives. The discussion presents a process model and elaborates on the three sequential patterns of action. The paper contributes to the program literature by exploring the dynamics of how routines emerge through their own enactment and in relation to other actions at the program level.

Digitalization, with its potential to enhance the openness of client–contractor knowledge collaboration (KC) at the front end of complex engineering projects, is gaining traction among project scholars and practitioners. Despite this growing interest, project actors still struggle to bring client and contractor experts into an open, digitally enabled collaborative space where they can freely access and cocreate project-related knowledge. In this context, our case study explores client–contractor KC in the front-end phase of oil and gas projects in Norway to understand why project actors struggle to achieve KC openness in the digital age. Based on our qualitative analysis, we developed a model that displays two intertwined aspects giving rise to tensions between knowledge sharing and protection. First, we show that these tensions stem from fragmented awareness of the expertise in the collaborating project organization. Second, we highlight how intrainstitutional complexity, instantiated in coexisting conflicting logics of digital and collaborative action, underlies divergent beliefs and behavior toward client–contractor KC and its digitalization. We offer novel insights into the project management literature by showcasing how organizational heterogeneity, in terms of expertise and institutions, challenges project organizations' pursuit of open, digitally enabled client–contractor KC during the front-end project phase.

This study examines the critical role of university IT departments in the digital transformation of higher education institutions. Despite their expertise, these departments often face challenges in facilitating digital transformation. Through a historical case study of a prominent research university, this paper explores the evolution of technology and organizational logic within the university's IT governance and its shortcomings in supporting digital transformation. It presents an in-depth analysis of the co-evolution of technological advancements and the organization responsible for technology support and maintenance. The paper traces the transition from the early era, dominated by academic logics, to contemporary IT organizations driven by bureaucratic and internal market logics. It further investigates the preference for specific technological solutions under different organizational logics. Crucially, the paper highlights a misalignment between the traditional logic of IT organizations and the demands of digital transformation, demonstrating that conventional IT approaches and logics are insufficient for addressing the challenges of digital transformation. © 2024 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

The front-end customer–supplier collaborative creation processes are attracting increasing interest from project scholars. We still know little of these processes, however, which are increasingly being digitalized. Drawing from a qualitative case study of customer–supplier knowledge collaboration (KC) at the front-end phase of oil and gas projects in Norway, we explore why collaborative actors struggle to achieve KC openness in the digital age. We develop a model displaying how the fragmented ambient awareness networks and the coexisting collaborative and digital logics exacerbate the subjectivity of the project actors, giving rise to sharing–protection tensions. We offer novel insights for project management and interorganizational relations literature by showing how logic complexity challenges the project organizations’ inherent efforts to achieve open, digitally driven KC at the projects’ front end. Our results also suggest that logic complexity and double talk around KC showcase a hypocritic organizational response to the enduring openness challenge in customer–supplier project relations in the digital age.

The digital transformation of society is ubiquitous, and even well-established educational institutions are affected. Universities need to adapt to the ongoing digital transformation, both to stay relevant but also to prosper. Yet, many public sector universities face obstacles when aiming to transform their business into a digital one, and this calls for research into the strategic organizational elements and related factors that hinder or aid the process. Drawing from an in-depth case study, it analyses data collected via a survey and multiple interviews to explore the organizational challenges a university faces when starting to adapt to digital transformation. The study shows that an organization's collective understanding of its business logics is a prerequisite to advancing digital transformation. The study of a university also shows that the digital transformation focus is skewed towards increasing efficiency rather than the innovation of new practices.

Collaboration involving large variety of actors across sectors, industries, and institutional settings have become prevalent in searching and creating new knowledge for variety of wicked and complex problems. These fluid forms of collaboration – labelled as knowledge ecosystems – allow organizations to collaborate with other organizations and individuals in a quest to search for and create new knowledge. The literature has thus far helped recognize the prevalence of knowledge ecosystems and their potential benefits, but is relatively silent on their origins and emergence. To bridge this gap, in this paper we theorize knowledge ecosystems as meta-organizations that pursue organizationality via establishment of organizing elements that aim for joint search of new knowledge. By virtue of this foundation, we analyze a longitudinal case study of High-Capacity Transport ecosystem in Sweden, and demonstrate the key organizational elements that emerged over the course of over ten years. We distinguish a process model explaining how three elements of organizationality in a knowledge ecosystem – participation, identity, and actorhood – emerge sequentially and by building iteratively on each other. The process model contributes to the theory, practice, and policy of knowledge ecosystems emergence.

Tackling the societal challenges we are facing requires collaboration among many actors with quite different backgrounds and interests. Indeed, these challenges call for systemic and cross-sector collaboration. However, such collaboration is associated with several problems, concerning the creation and distribution of value among the actors involved. We need a new way of thinking about how value should be created and distributed among the involved actors to be able to make the necessary system-wide shifts that are needed. This article presents findings from an in-depth field study of the High-Capacity Transport (HCT) project and focuses on the system-wide shift towards more sustainable models within the transportation sector in Sweden. The article highlights four pressing challenges that may negatively influence collaboration, search, ideation, and value creation processes, and identifies four corresponding value pathways for effective system transformation projects. It offers advice on how to maneuver through these four challenges in system transformation projects to produce socially valuable outcomes.