The role of control mechanisms for governing innovation processes in a collaborative network: Insights from the Swedish Hockey League

Sammanfattning: This paper examines the role of management control for the governance and coordination of the implementation of an innovation in the Swedish Hockey League - a collaborative network of competing hockey clubs including a permanent governing body. By integrating the concepts of self-regulating and orchestration mechanisms (Mouritsen & Thrane, 2006), we analyze the role of these mechanisms during the implementation process and how they influence each other. In line with previous research, our findings suggest that self-regulating mechanisms automatically manage the financial flows to allow for interaction between firms to occur unobtrusively. Moreover, orchestration mechanisms enable network relationships and facilitate decision making. However, we contribute to the literature on management control and innovation in networks by showing that self-regulating and orchestration mechanisms are interdependent. The self-regulating mechanisms create prerequisites for the permanent governing body to coordinate the network collaboration by using orchestration mechanisms. Furthermore, we make an empirical contribution to the literature on actor-network theory in inter-organizational management accounting by studying the collaboration between the original network and a new actor temporarily included in the network. We claim that the collaboration between the original network and this new actor may be understood as a dyadic relationship, and that control mechanisms in such a relationship may be of little importance if inadequately designed.