Personal motivation and reflexive critique

Researchers’ personal motivation for management research includes for example learning, personal development, and research as a means to solve practical problems encountered (Essterby-Smith et al., 2008 / Lampela, 2009). Pertinently, reflexive critique brings up the cognitive and emotional process of de-mystifying the interrelationships between social actors and social practices in the specific context in which they occur (Antonacopoulou, 2010b). Accordingly, to be critical one must start

3 Elsewhere, the concept of knowledge interaction is used in the design of a new and mutual communication medium (Nishida, 2000; 2002), a study on knowledge channel model and policy (Kubota

& Nishida, 2003) and work on its relationship with different types of innovation (Tödtling, 2009).

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from being critical of the critical orientation one applies in assessing any situation including one’s own reason and practice.

One major reason for me to conduct such a cultural study is that I have a long-standing interest in cross-cultural research. The study is related to my early cross-cultural research in psychology, and in particular, to my personal cross-cultural experience studying, working and living in Finland and China for many years. I grew up in China, and Finland is my first foreign country visited. Since my fist visit to Finland in 1993, I have been in Finland for more than 15 years. In this sense I am “native” in both Chinese and Finnish societies and cultures. In the present study, I have benefited from living in and traveling across two countries, feeling inclined in a way to search for clues and insights within and across cultures. Moreover, many years’ experience of my teaching in knowledge management in Lappeenranta has helped me greatly to become familiar with the KM subject, become sensitive and able to discern cultural nuance, understanding better complex issues of culture and knowledge in a meaningful way. An additional advantage is that during my study I have been involved in two larger and successive research projects in the Lappeenranta KM group, Innospring Access and Janus, dealing with collaborative innovation. My involvement in these projects has brought me closer to real-world business and Finnish world-leading companies. Thus, it seemed to me a natural process to initiate such a U-I collaboration project of my own to integrate my personal motivation and interest in the broad field of networked innovation and knowledge management.

In my actual empirical study, I had the possibility to choose some of the case companies which were at the time research partners of the Innospring project. For the study presented here, I interviewed both university researchers and company practitioners.

Participant observation was, however, related only to the two case companies I had chosen, in which U-I workshops were the primary concern. Comparatively, I found it easier throughout the study to get access to university people, thanks to the long tradition of university open innovation and knowledge sharing. On the other hand, company people are more cautious with research proposals and interviews, as well as in what is said in the interviews. Furthermore, companies move fast and tend to undergo

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constant, often dramatic, change, and personnel changes are recurrent. This creates difficulty for the “slow” research field, particularly when the researchers’ key contact person is transferred. Finally, it is sometimes challenging to argue the benefit of academic research in the face of the company’s practical day-to-day business issues and solutions of the moment.

U-I R&D collaboration is possible, but it is by no means easy and it may take time. My study is a kind of research on research collaboration between academia and industry. In a broad sense, it appears exactly the same as U-I collaboration. For my case, for instance, I started my research project completely from the point of view of a university.

First of all, I had to introduce clearly my research project to the case companies: what the topic is; what benefits the project might bring to the companies; what kind of information I was seeking from the companies; who and how many people need to be interviewed; and when and how long it might take, etc. During the project I learnt that one has to actively and consistently contact key managers who one would like to interview or from whom one could get access to colleagues. As a Chinese proverb goes,

“to persist is to win.”

One major contribution of my dissertation lies in the emphasis on the significance of Chinese guanxi in U-I collaboration and knowledge interaction. How did the concept of guanxi become part of my dissertation research? When I started the research, I realised that guanxi is of course very important in the Chinese context, but it was perhaps too general and had perhaps been discussed and researched already too much. Furthermore, China is undergoing rapid economic transformation and major social change and in this context it is rather challenging to recognize and capture the real meaning of the concept with regard to the various changes. I avoided the concept, even intentionally, for the time being. This attitude changed when I interviewed a senor innovation manager of one case company in relation to my participant experience and observation in their U-I workshop in Beijing. I suddenly realized that the issue of guanxi was durably and robustly alive in the context of my study and it was closely-related to the issues of culture I had been researching for some time. The point is that particularly in exploratory and complex management research, one must remain open-minded, flexible

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and be sensitive to data and the possible directions in which it may lead. The connotation of guanxi is changing in China. Nevertheless, as Faure and Fang (2008) have noted, in terms of the thinking process, modern Chinese society remains anchored in that which has gone before, being good at keeping up with paradoxes and making good balance of the opposite ends yin and yang. In handling guanxi, it seems evident that Chinese do not intend to eliminate guanxi because of its negative or dark side but tend to make use of it by balancing both positive and negative sides of guanxi!