'High energy' collisions and sustainable collaborations in outlier organisations: The cases of ATLAS Experiment and KIC InnoEnergy

Overcoming 'high energy' collisions and promoting sustainable collaborations between partners in some outlier organisations is of central importance for their continuance. The intermediary function, performed by human and non-human agents, acquires an important role in these contexts by helping partners to effectively integrate knowledge that would lead into successful innovations. This study aims to investigate this function through an exploratory study of two outlier organisations: ATLAS Experiment and KIC InnoEnergy. Initial findings show that the informal emergence of the intermediary function is contingent on issues that prevent collaborative activities to be developed and that, in the case of human agents, intermediaries need to be internally legitimised so they can influence the development of practice.