Rigidity and Flexibility in Multi-Stakeholder Innovation: The Lasting Impact of Project Design

Recent studies on multi-stakeholder collaboration to address societal challenges highlighted the importance of embracing organizing principles associated with both rigidity and flexibility. Yet, the role of rigid and flexible organizing for enabling integration of and adjustment to new information in multi-stakeholder work is insufficiently understood. Based on a longitudinal study of a smart city project, this paper advances scholarship on multi-stakeholder innovation by unraveling how new information is made sense of through enactments that help reinforce or restore initial project goals. We theorize how, despite new information being addressed with some degree of creativity and flexibility as a project proceeds, its rigid initial design can strongly shape what kind of experimentation is later afforded and thus have a lasting impact on a project’s eventual accomplishment of innovation. To multi-stakeholder researchers as well as practitioners, our study therefore suggests paying more attention to how starting assumptions embedded in predefined goals may considerably shape ongoing experimentation.