The affordance of boundary objects for codified project learning sharing between communities of practice: Pilot study results and learnings for selected sustainability demonstration projects

Effective project-to-project learning can prevent projects from repeating the same mistakes however externalised knowledge sharing is necessary to overcome temporal, geographical and organisational barriers. Externalised sharing for this purpose requires the codification of knowledge relating to project learnings within boundary objects, where codification may be impacted by an array of complex considerations. Among these considerations is whether the capacity of the boundary object affords boundary spanning between communities of practice, where boundary-spanning capacity is influenced by the characteristics codified within the object. The grand-challenge context of sustainability demonstration projects provides an important case context for boundary spanning as these projects have knowledge sharing and learning as a central focus, key driver and intended outcome. While the application of boundary objects has been explored in a wide range of domains and cases, this article specifically considers the characteristics of boundary objects representing codified project learnings to afford project-to-project knowledge sharing, a focus which has not yet been studied in either the sustainability demonstration context or any other project-to-future learning organisation case context. An initial pilot study has been conducted with four sustainability demonstration case projects, with results and learnings to guide the refinement of future large-scale research design.