Collective competence in an interdisciplinary project context

Abstract: An increasing number of articles in management journals has recognised knowledge as being the organisation's prime resource, and particular interest has been given to the ways in which knowledge is managed by organisations in order to stay competitive. Management of knowledge incorporates aspects related to the question of how to co-ordinate knowledge held by highly specialised individuals and projects are often considered to be a solution to this problem of coordinating different knowledge bases. Therefore, this study, exploring the processes involved in the establishment and maintenance of collective competence, is undertaken in the context of an interdisciplinary development project. Learning processes in highly constrained projects are also explored.The findings suggest that collective competence is reached from the basis of two different logics, an interacting logic and an interrelating logic, each associated with a number of different processes. These processes make possible the creation of a representation of the context that forms the basis of each individual's contribution to project work.