Inter-organisational networks, value creation and the process of technology integration in research and development

Traditional methods of R&D management are no longer sufficient for embracing innovations and leveraging complex new technologies to fully integrated positions in established systems. This paper presents the view that the technology integration process is a result of fundamental interactions embedded in inter-organisational activities. Emerging industries, high technology companies and knowledge intensive organisations owe a large part of their viability to complex networks of inter-organisational interactions and relationships. R&D organisations are the gatekeepers in the technology integration process with their initial sanction and motivation to develop technologies providing the first point of entry. Networks rely on the activities of stakeholders to provide the foundations of collaborative R&D activities, business-to-business marketing and strategic alliances. Such complex inter-organisational interactions and relationships influence value creation and organisational goals as stakeholders seek to gain investment opportunities. A theoretical model is developed here that contributes to our understanding of technology integration (adoption) as a dynamic process, which is simultaneously structured and enacted through the activities of stakeholders and organisations in complex inter-organisational networks of sanction and integration.

Investigating the dilemmas of ethical social research

The author’s work with a university ethics committee and field research in Pacific New Caledonia is used as a basis to problematise the biomedical research models used by universities in Australia for assessing social research as ethical. The article explores how culturally specific Western emotional bases for ethical decisions are often unexamined. It expresses concerns about gaps in biomedical models by linking the author’s description of field interactions with research participants to debates about the creation of knowledge.