Brokers or Platforms? A Longitudinal Study of How Hybrid Interorganizational Partnerships for Regional Innovation Deal with VUCA Environments

The study investigates the role played by turbulent environments in the evolution of hybrid (i.e., multi-party, cross-sector) partnerships for regional innovation. Although extant research suggests that organizations decide to participate in such partnerships to cope with their turbulent environments, little is known about how actual perceptions of turbulent environments influence the setup and evolution of a partnership. Our qualitative study adopts a longitudinal design to investigate the evolution of a cross-sector regional innovation partnership between ten very different organizations. With the help of the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) model proposed by Bennett and Lemoine (2014a), we study the relation between partners’ initial perceptions of environmental turbulence and the models adopted for the partnership throughout its lifecycle (emergent, brokering and platform). We show that partners’ intentions to solve perceived environmental turbulence through collaboration can have the unexpected consequence of triggering perceived turbulence inside the collaboration itself. Specifically, we show that perceived partnership VUCA at each stage was a result of partners’ attempts to cope with the perceived VUCA in the previous stage. The study thus highlights a set of common traps that both public and private organizations engaged in hybrid partnerships might fall into precisely as they try to lower VUCA threats in their environments.