Collaborative innovation

Innovation is only rarely a solitary activity, and usually a collaborative process where individuals, teams and organizations combine their complementary resources and skills to develop new products and services. Organizations collaborate internally by using crossfunctional teams with representatives from various key functional domains within an organization, such as marketing, R&D, manufacturing, purchasing and finance. These innovation teams combine the different perspectives and objectives of an organization’s key disciplines to develop successful innovations. In addition, organizations collaborate with various external parties, such as customers, suppliers, competitors and research institutes. These collaborations with external parties range from informal, temporary arrangements to formal joint ventures.

The growing emphasis on collaborative innovation is illustrated by the continuous interest in joint ventures, industry-university collaboration and strategic alliances, as well as by the growing popularity of more recent concepts such as virtual teams, open innovation, co-creation, ecosystems and crowdsourcing and online user communities.

This research profile studies both internal collaboration (collaboration within organizations in crossfunctional teams) and external collaboration (collaboration between organizations), as well as the relationship between them. Our researchers explore how organizations develop successful innovations by combining and managing both internal and external knowledge from various sources. Research projects focus on topics such as:

• Crossfunctional collaboration in innovation teams
• Innovation implications of alliance portfolios
• Governance of R&D relationships
• Appropriating value from collaborative innovation
• Coopetition networks for innovation
• Digital collaboration for innovation