The research project focuses on the influence of organizational, technical and cultural terms on building trust in interorganizational projects.

Due to globalization, digitalization and flexibility, companies are forced to operate in interorganizational and global cooperations to be successful in highly competitive markets. In times of flexibilization of production processes and corporate network structures, trust becomes increasingly important. In projects, trust is not only a part of the social glue that sticks team members together and fosters the stability of a cooperation, but trust also is essential to achieve innovative results in weakly structured situations. As to innovation (and the success of collaborative engineering), the exchange of information, knowledge and experiences is decisive and trust is an important key factor to ensure this exchange. Trust can be a crucial factor for a required cooperation`s success or failure.

There are different advantages following out of an effective impact of trust in interorganizational collaborations. When trust within cooperations is strong, the speed of developing processes can increase whereas costs can go down. Mutual trust provides the possibility to reduce extensive processes of controlling and regulating. It also reduces transaction costs and enhances the creativity and stability of cooperations. Particularly under the conditions of divergent partial interests and the coexistence of cooperation and competition (“coopetition”), it is important to build trust and to cope with mistrust within a cooperation. Hence, trust has an economic impact.

The research project TRUST aims to identify those parameters that have an affect to enhance or reduce trust in collaborations to optimize their success.

Although there are numerous analyses and reports which deal with teamwork and the management of projects, a systematic research on trust and mistrust in interorganizational collaboration is still missing. This is one reason why companies do not find manageable advices and recommendations for establishing trust within teams. The research project TRUST starts off at this point. The ongoing work within this project tries to close this gap and pursues the goal to provide a scientific analysis of trust in interorganizational teams and to show trust-oriented ways to improve collaborations for the practical use.