Organising Collaboration Through Boundary Work in a Co-Located Environment

Sammanfattning

As innovation ecosystems increasingly rely on co-location to facilitate collaboration, less attention has been given to how collaboration and value creation are organised in everyday practice. This study aims to address this gap by exploring how collaboration is organised and enacted in practice within a co-located environment, using GoCo Health Innovation City as an empirical setting. Based on a qualitative single-case study, 24 semi-structured interviews and 80 hours of on-site observations were conducted to capture how actors engage in collaboration in their daily work. Drawing on the theoretical framework of boundary work, complemented by social capital, the study examines how actors navigate, maintain, and cross organisational and social boundaries. The findings show that co-location structures opportunities for interaction but does not automatically generate collaboration. Instead, collaboration emerges through relational processes such as repeated interaction, trust building, and network mobilisation, while value creation develops unevenly under regulatory, competitive, and organisational constraints. The study further shows that collaboration is uneven, shaped by actors' differing ability to engage across boundaries. Thus, social capital functions not only as a resource that enables collaboration, but as a mechanism of exclusion. Trust-based relationships tend to reinforce existing ties, leaving newcomers and less embedded actors peripheral despite being physically co-located. Thus, this study contributes to the innovation ecosystem literature by reconceptualising co-location as a condition that structures opportunities for boundary work rather than a mechanism that directly generates collaboration, demonstrating how value creation emerges through carefully negotiated relational processes, and showing that access to these processes is unevenly distributed in ways that existing literature has insufficiently acknowledged.