22 nd Bled eConference eEnablement: Facilitating an Open, Effective and Representative eSociety June 14 - 17, 2009; Bled, Slovenia Activity, ICT, and Material Infrastructure in Complex Multi- Organisational Settings: An assessment of innovation potential for pharmaceutical cold chain transport and handling Allen Higgins♠, Anita Mangan♦, Angela Kerrigan, Suzanne Laffan, Stefan Klein♣ ♠Warwick Business School; ISM University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 8UW, UK a.c.higgins@warwick.ac.uk ♦Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation, University College Dublin, Ireland ♣European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS), University of Münster, Germany Abstract What are the infrastructural possibilities for introducing novel ICT based services in the international multi-modal logistics environment? The specific case of nascent real- time reporting potentials for cold chain transport and handling in a hybrid data carrier environment is explored and an infrastructural analysis indicates the technical suitability of a GSM telemetry. Activities and technology-in-use were also observed and our analysis suggests that a socio-organisational infrastructure of uniform or standard practices, policies, procedures and software is infeasible and may in fact be undesirable in complex, international, multi-organisational settings. Keywords: cold-chain, inter-organisational system, network innovation, real-time 1 Introduction How might members of organisations attempt to introduce innovative technologies in complex, international, multi-organisational, multi-modal and multi-systems environments? More generally, how can organisational actors experiment, develop and 170