The ability to combine exploitation, (i.e. optimizing existing processes and products), and exploration, (i.e. searching for new and innovative approaches towards technology, business processes, or markets), is called ambidexterity and seen as important driver of sustainable economic success. We study, how companies use interorganizational collaboration in order to efficiently balance exploration and exploitation and extend their ambidexterous capabilities in the context of small and medium size IT service providers.
Preliminary findings suggest that the companies we have studied are aware of the challenge and have found different practices to ensure not only enough space for exploration with partners but also to use innovation to improve their routine operations.

Authors:   Prof. D. Vieru, TELUQ University, Montréal and Prof. S. Klein, WWU Münster

Collaborative work practices are being transformed through the growth of co-working in urban third spaces, makerspaces, fab labs, incubators, accelerators and digital labs. This paper is based on a 2-year project carried out by a network of academics and practitioners interested in new work practices in the collaborative economy, focusing particularly on collaborative workspaces. We concentrate on the relationships between collaboration and these new work practices according to three levels, individual, community and societal, highlighting their spatial and temporal dimensions. Our results indicate that: boundaries between waged employment and entrepreneurship are not rigid; individuals not only suffer from stress in traditional organisations but also of boredom; new collaborative practices imply rethinking their own competences and prospects, often leading to fundamental life changes; co-working communities can provide collective meaning, crucial to supporting these transformations; they can be orientated towards practice, professional identity, and emotional support to address loneliness and sense-making; public discourses about entrepreneurship and innovation and territorial policies are not clearly linked to innovative practices in collaborative spaces. We conclude that there is need for better coordination between public actors and collaborative communities which should be seen at the heart of economic, educational, industrial and cultural policies targeting the city, aiming at collaborating and sharing.

The proliferation of collaboration platforms in organisations has benefits for knowledge workers in terms of access to knowledge and social resources. However, negative effects, specifically collaborative overload, have only recently been acknowledged and are still rarely considered by companies. Collaborative overload is a multi-faceted construct, which covers downsides, unintended or side-effects of collaboration platforms and their organisational use. In this talk, the phenomenon is introduced and explored. Based on a narrative literature review, we contextualise collaborative overload, propose an agenda for future research and derive an initial research framework to clarify and delineate collaborative overload. With this twofold contribution, we aim to provide a frame of reference for the discourse about this important syndrome of modern workplaces.