Collaborative innovation

Boswell, C. 2003. InnoCentive and Web-Based Collaborative Innovation. Chemical Market Reporter, April 14. 

Development of new process analytical tools - including sensors and data analysis -continues. Developments tend to grow out of necessity to solve a particular problem and arise from collaborative innovation between analytical chemists (in industry and academia) and industrial scientists and process engineers. Industrial scientists and engineers can... 

State Key Laboratory and Institute of Elemento-organic Chemistry, Nankai University, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin),... 

Products and services and customers are inextricably linked. An enterprise s value proposition is expressed in the value—the products and services—it delivers to its customers. In the New Economy, these linkages will become more formalized as organizations innovate and produce new products with their customers. Customer capital will grow when the enterprise and its customers learn from each other. Collaborative innovation will be in everyone s best interest. 

Collaborative innovation is the new imperative because of a fundamental market shift. All markets by their very nature exist to promote win-win interactions. The interactions are motivated by the premise that entities that interact will be better off after interacting than they were before, that is, interactions for both... 

As traditionally conceived of, the three pillars of growth - professions, infras-tmcture, and investment - work well for markets that are primarily directed toward product and production process innovation. However, for markets that are directed toward the innovation of business and societal systems and networks, the three pillars must be reconceived in the context of collaborative innovation. For example, professions require both deeper expert thinking and multidisciplinary complex communication skills infrastmcture, both technological and institutional, becomes more open and adaptive and investment, both short-term and long-term, is globally interconnected and interdependent. New opportunities and risks abound. 

Collaborative innovation has become the new arbiter of national competitiveness. We must recognize collaborative innovation as a national priority. For the United States or any nation to thrive in the hyper-competitive world economy they must, with urgency, mobilize business, government, educators, and researchers to adopt collaborative innovation as a core strategy to build the foundation for a 21st-century knowledge-based economy. 

Collaborative innovation success will be a product of many stakeholders collaborating and sharing the risk of change. To facilitate the process, national policy architectures must be modernized to address the changing nature of innovation and growth. The redesign of national innovation policies must be balanced, consistent and coordinated, and focused on crucial challenges. 

Applied more broadly, our experience drives us to conclude that collaborative innovators need a culture of learning and skill building. Specifically, it means that technologists and business experts need to work closely together, not simply to share insights, but to create entirely new intellectual capital for competitive advantage -new types of value-cocreation mechanisms We must build the capacity to apply new intellectual property to nurture and launch new high-value businesses. 

While IP ownership is an essential driver of innovation, technological advances are often dependent on shared knowledge, standards, and collaborative innovation. The IP framework must enable both. We must protect truly new, novel, and useful inventions. And we need to recognize that open standards can accelerate the interoperability and expansion of the global infrastructure. Because collaborative innovation is relatively new, the stmcture and processes to accommodate ownership, openness, and access are evolving, and new creative models are emerging. 

The same can be said of infrastructure - be it transportation, energy, health care, information technology networks or communications. Taken together, the institutional policy and infrastructure environments create a national infrastructure platform that can accelerate - or impede - the pace and quality of collaborative innovation. 

The directional roadmap for R D investment in a global, knowledge-intensive service economies is aimed at building collaborative innovation capacity throughout the ecosystem of entities that participate in the open marketplace. 

To pursue open, collaborative innovation, enterprises simply must find ways to tap into the potential of the skill, talent, and creativity of people from different teams in different organizations across the globe. A company can only be as innovative as the collective capacity of the people who make up its ecosystem. And to attract and retain talented people, a company must enable those people to feel respected, as individuals, as professionals and as members of a team. The company must tmst those people and encourage them to collaborate and innovate with colleagues within and outside the business, driven as much by pride of contribution as by loyalty to the company. 

We are convinced that the art of collaborative innovation will be the most distinguishing leadership characteristic of the 21st century. Universities need to teach it. Government policies and regulations need to facilitate it. Businesses need to practice it. 

For collaborative innovation to become part of our collective DNA, we must accept the notion that the surest way to make progress and solve problems is to tap into the collective knowledge of the team. Networked enterprises are the future. No individual enterprise, no matter how large and talented, can afford to go it alone in today s highly competitive, globally integrated marketplace. 

Different models of networked innovation and offer a set of guidelines for companies to identify and prepare for the most promising collaborative innovation opportunities. As they emphasize, success also requires us to rethink the very nature of our relationships with innovation partners - what we need to control and what we... 

In Implications for Institutions Nations and Businesses, we focused on the realities that drive nations and businesses to make collaborative innovation a top priority. In Implications for Disciplines Science and Engineering, we focus on what collaborative innovation means to science and engineering disciplines. Just as no nation or business is an island, no science or engineering discipline is an island. More specialization in the world creates both more disciplines and many more boundary zones that interconnect disciplines. In fact, linear growth in the number of disciplines creates exponentially more possible boundary zones, or points for collaboration between disciplines (Tables 18.1 and 18.2). 

In discussions about collaborative innovation, one often hears the terms multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and transdisciplinary. Some people use these terms almost interchangeably, but they are in fact different. Along with the term disciplinary (perhaps more correctly termed intradisciplinary ), these five terms can be used to describe knowledge, people, types of research or educational activities, and teams of people. 

Armed with an understanding of the growth of disciplines, the shape of professionals in terms of discipline knowledge, and nature of the relationships between disciplines, we can now return to the challenges of collaborative innovation. 

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