Solving complex societal challenges requires innovation processes that involve heterogeneous organizations collaborating for sustained periods of time. These multiparty collaborations are confronted with incongruent temporal structures, creating temporal complexities that hamper joint action. We draw on an in-depth longitudinal field study of a multiparty collaboration in a “living lab” initiative that aimed to develop innovative solutions to enhance a city’s nightlife area’s safety and economic viability. We unpack the process of temporal coordination by identifying three temporal coordination mechanisms that enabled parties to address temporal complexities: leveraging serendipitous alignment, temporary exclusion, and aligning on the future. Whereas, prior research has stressed synchronization as a dominant approach to coordination, rooted in a clock-time orientation, these three mechanisms for temporal coordination are rooted in process-time. With a process-time orientation, temporal coordination becomes inherently partial and transient, meaning that temporal complexities may resurface over time and require re-initiation of joint action, building upon emerging outcomes of previous episodes. We discuss implications for the literature on interorganizational collaboration and temporal coordination.

要解决复杂的社会挑战，就需要创新过程，这些过程涉及异类组织在持续的一段时间内进行协作。这些多方协作面临着时间结构不一致的问题，从而造成了阻碍联合行动的时间复杂性。我们在“生活实验室”计划中对多方合作进行了深入的纵向研究，旨在开发创新的解决方案以增强城市夜生活区的安全性和经济可行性。我们通过确定使各方能够解决时间复杂性的三个时间协调机制来展开时间协调的过程：利用偶然性的契合，暂时的排斥和对未来的契合。鉴于先前的研究强调同步是协调的主要方法，根植于时钟时间方向，这三种时间协调机制根植于过程时间。以过程时间为导向，时间协调从本质上讲是局部的和短暂的，这意味着时间复杂性可能会随着时间的流逝而重新出现，并需要在先前事件的新出现结果的基础上重新发起联合行动。我们讨论组织间协作和时间协调的文献意义。