Sharing common ground: an examination of factors that facilitate inter-organisational innovation activity at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park inclusive innovation district, London, UK.

No single organisation has all the knowledge and capabilities needed to continuously innovate. In order to gain competitive advantage, organisations need to gain access to knowledge outside the organisational boundary through different types of inter-organisational relationships. Yet the process is challenging. The paradox of inter-organisational innovation is that organisations must access knowledge from beyond the organisational boundary in order to continuously innovate, but the process of accessing that knowledge and managing the necessary inter-organisational relationships is challenging, time consuming, complex, and costly. A key question for scholars is to understand what factors facilitate inter-organisational relationships, networks, and innovation activity; that question is the focus of this thesis. We examined the relational and innovation experiences of a sample of heterogeneous organisations located at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park innovation district in London, United Kingdom. Using qualitative network methods, we examined what types of interorganisational relationships and networks formed, what knowledge was created or shared, and what facilitated innovation activity at a micro level. We find that when diverse actors are located in close physical proximity, this increases how regularly they are able to interact socially, which creates a number of benefits. Organisations are able to identify new opportunities for creating relationships, through which they can access, create, and share different types of knowledge efficiently, and govern their relationships and innovation activities informally. Through the implementation of a unique interorganisational network intervention, we find that opportunities for cross-industry knowledge exchange are enhanced when people get to know each other on a personal level. We contribute to and extend a number of existing theories with our findings, which show that even in a digitally connected era, regional inter-organisational networks and proximity dimensions continue to play an important role in facilitating innovation. We contribute to proximity theories by examining different dimensions of proximity at a micro level in a unique setting and find that geographic, social, and personal proximity dimensions play an important role in facilitating cross-industry knowledge exchange. We contribute methodologically to the network literature by applying intra-organisational network intervention methods to an inter-organisational setting and find support for emerging network theories relating to the nested processes of inter-individual and inter-organisational tie formation. Findings from our studies have practical implications for city developers and organisations that wish to understand what drives innovation at micro level and how managers can intervene.