I concluded my MSc in Digital and Interaction Design at Politecnico di Milano with a research thesis on the topic of Collaborative Learning.
ABSTRACT
Collaborative learning is a strategic asset for creative and innovation-driven organisations in the knowledge economy. Project teams need to invest on the one hand in refining their knowledge management processes and strategies to support organisational learning. And on the other, they also need to work on boosting their collaboration practices and community building to ensure that the organisational environment is actually conducive to learning. Leadership and governance have a decisive role in this dynamic and distributed setting, in particular as hybrid working environments come to define the new panorama and its complex challenges. Design and creative teams in particular, being in knowledge intensive workspaces, oftentimes at the forefront of technological innovation, are particularly exposed to these changes and therefore represent an opportunity to discover early adopters of promising solutions, as well as a fertile ground for experimentation on these topics.
To understand how creative teams can build and maintain shared knowledge in the hybrid working environment I exploit theoretical concepts and models extracted from the literature to outline the problem space and the factors that define it. I then apply research methods to a real scenario, to enrich the problem space definition with real data and insights from the field. The knowledge gathered from both research streams is then used to elaborate a preliminary collaborative learning strategy for the scenario of reference. The outcome of the research activity is presented to the team, and the feedback gathered from this experimental activity is used to assess the proposal and the overall research approach. I therefore argue for a balanced combination of codification and socialisation strategies for knowledge management within creative teams, and for the continuous experimentation and iterations that allow teams to dynamically adapt organisational processes and structures to the changing context.
To understand how creative teams can build and maintain shared knowledge in the hybrid working environment I exploit theoretical concepts and models extracted from the literature to outline the problem space and the factors that define it. I then apply research methods to a real scenario, to enrich the problem space definition with real data and insights from the field. The knowledge gathered from both research streams is then used to elaborate a preliminary collaborative learning strategy for the scenario of reference. The outcome of the research activity is presented to the team, and the feedback gathered from this experimental activity is used to assess the proposal and the overall research approach. I therefore argue for a balanced combination of codification and socialisation strategies for knowledge management within creative teams, and for the continuous experimentation and iterations that allow teams to dynamically adapt organisational processes and structures to the changing context.
KEYWORDS
+ distributed collaboration
+ org. learning
+ design strategy
+ dynamic governance
+ org. development
+ design operations
+ social sciences
+ org. learning
+ design strategy
+ dynamic governance
+ org. development
+ design operations
+ social sciences