ENABLING CONTINUOUS KNOWLEDGE COMBINING Learning to interact as teams at Volvo Cars when co-developing across organisational borders

Partnerships and relations within the entire supply network are becoming increasingly important, and unavoidable, as companies strive to be competitive. Utilising Inter-Organisational Collaboration (IOC) has the potential of being highly beneficial and can enable innovative competitiveness through knowledge combining, but also comes with many challenges. An increased degree of collaboration is a global industrial trend highly affecting Volvo Cars Corporation (VCC). Managing to collaborate is important as a consequence of these developments, the large presence of networking and reliance on other partners expertise to succeed. Current trends are leading the automotive industry to include a diverse range of other competence bases and being in the forefront of new innovations and market trends. In studying the IOC, its processes and potential benefits in automotive, other industries can find similarities and learnings deriving from this context. This Master Thesis therefor fulfils the purpose to identify and create a greater understanding of what enables or limits knowledge combining in Inter-Organisational Collaboration. These parameters are considered in an Agile context where multiple parties contribute to product development continuously during an extended period. Within this study the context is therefore two different groups (ARTs) of Agile teams working with suppliers in continuous collaboration. Empirical material from these ARTs and suppliers have been gathered through 16 interviews, analysed and concluded upon. Five stories of certain trends and findings are presented, as well as analysis of how this relates to theory. Ending this Master Thesis is a conclusion leading to managerial and research implications, as well as proposals for future research. Collaboration is, according to our findings, ever more important and to treat all the underlying complexities the organisations have to start by creating a common understanding through interaction points and tight collaboration. This coupled approach of development allows common goals and increased commitment for every party. From this it is later possible to understand each other better even when not working tightly together. According to our findings Agile always calls for coupled collaboration in order to build common goals and then allows dividing tasks more sufficiently