Team learning as boundary crossing: incubating collaboration

Academic incubators are used to support collaborative and entrepreneurial projects in order to catalyze innovative ideas into viable ventures. This study examined five seed-phase entrepreneurial teams who participated in an academic incubator at a graduate school of business in order to better understand what differentiated successful teams from unsuccessful teams. While traditional learning models describe the processes observed in successful teams, frameworks for understand internal team communication challenges help explain why some teams were able to develop success processes while others faltered. Unique features of high-innovation contexts and seed-phase entrepreneurs highlight the importance of communication across internal and external boundaries as well as honing external communication regarding the business case. Findings from this study suggest the value of learning to communicate across knowledge boundaries by making those boundaries explicit through the use of tools and protocols, which can be introduced by HRD professionals supporting teams in workplaces, academic incubator directors, research leads, mentors, and faculty instructing courses with collaborative learning components.