Temporal Dynamics in Multipartner Coordination: Sequentiality and Simultaneity in R&D Projects

Prior research has suggested that collaborating with multiple partners promises better innovation performance. However, multi-partner collaborations also bring additional management challenges stemming from the more complex coordination among multiple, often diverse, partners. Adopting a coordination perspective, this study offers new insights on the optimal temporal coordination in multi-partner collaborations. We argue that effective coordination in multi-partner collaboration is likely to require episodes of sequential collaboration with partners (sequentiality) as well as periods of simultaneous involvement of all partners (simultaneity). The optimal balance between the two is project-specific and depends on the complexity of the technology developed and managerial resource constraints. We find support for these conjectures in analyses of over 1,000 R&D projects in a major firm in the electronics industry."