Organizations today need to adapt their operations for a more sustainable future, and the transition management literature has highlighted the need for individuals who can collaborate with others to find new paths forward. Essentially, these individuals are boundary spanners with specific skills and competences to bridge diverging perspectives and facilitate knowledge dissemination and integration. Such individuals become critical change agents in organizations and essential in preparing the organization for sustainability transitions. The purpose of this study is to explore how organizations can enable and encourage individuals to take on this role and develop the skills and competences needed to become boundary spanners. Based on a case study set in a large Canadian energy corporation striving to shift towards more sustainable operations, our paper explores the emergence of boundary spanners, focusing on the effects of a design training program in supporting such roles in the organization. Our findings outline essential characteristics of boundary spanners; through illustrative career trajectories of four individuals participating in the training program, we show how the training program contributed to the emergence of boundary spanners.

The fuzzy front end is the critical initial step of an innovation process during which new ideas emerge. This step's functioning is well understood when the ideas produced are in line with the organisation's directions or roadmap. In that case, there are a variety of managerial methods available to guide, filter and control the development of ideas while reducing the associated risks. However, we know considerably less about the emergence and development of orphan ideas, that is ideas that are not aligned with the firm's strategic roadmap. Such orphan ideas are beyond the scope of managers because they are not consistent with the orientations and needs identified by the firm. The aim of this article is to start to fill this gap through the qualitative study of three unexpected ideation processes at Hydro‐Québec's research institute. Our data reveal a process characterised by a complicated intertwinement of formal and informal mechanisms and relationships. In particular, our results show that informal groups, which can be assimilated to epistemic communities, play a major role in the orchestration of the first stages of the journey of orphan ideas by taking charge of the development of the value proposition and of the idea's integration in the firm's managerial and strategic framework. Further, managing orphan ideas requires specific managerial devices and social mechanisms.

Scholars agree that the roadmapping process and product both have multiple benefits for organizations in terms of strategic planning and coordination of strategic activities. However, the social and organizational aspects surrounding strategic and technological roadmapping are still poorly understood. By mobilizing the literature on strategic tools-in-use this paper explores the affordances and functions of roadmapping. Our results, based on a longitudinal study show that the roadmapping process and product fulfill three main types of function: instrumental, symbolic, and political. We also find that the benefits of roadmapping are highly dependent on the political affordances that individuals anticipate in advance.