Collaborative innovation skills

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. 

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. 

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. 

One of the primary incentives for inter-firm collaboration is organizational learning. Powell Koput (1996) succinctly indicate the motive for these linkages Research breakthroughs demand a range of intellectual and scientific skills that far exceed the capabilities of any one organization. As knowledge is brokered across institutional frames, opportunities for creativity and recombinant innovation are dramatically enabled ... 

Depending on the business model(s) chosen, companies need to define their specific innovation headroom . This includes answering questions such as how important are innovations in the segment What do strategic customers need Should companies go for innovation in technology, service offerings, or in the value chain What does that imply for R D capacities and skills How can R D best collaborate with marketing and sales, (potential) customers, and external research institutes What level of external versus internal R D is required ... 

With pure or fundamental research the provision of commercial opportunities is, by its very nature, a long way into the future. However, in industry this is the final objective, no matter how far into the future, it is not science for the sake of science. This type of long-term work is uncommon in most chemical companies and at best only represents a very small fraction of total R D budgets, even in the largest companies. It is often contracted out or carried out in collaboration with research institutes and universities, these bodies finding that it provides them with a useful source of funding and indeed a new role in the economic welfare of a country. The time frames and measures of success are quite different from product oriented research and when carried out in industry requires special management skills. This will be dealt with in Section C on innovation and creativity. 

The waves of industrial revolution mentioned in section 18.3 are sometimes referred to as waves of innovation and industrial development. They are also called Kondratiev waves, or K-waves. What matters for the purpose of this ehapter is not the theory of cycles and waves in industrial development, but rather the word Iimo-vation, which is common to all those historical industrial developments. Research and irmovation are directly related to and dependent on the soft skills mentioned in the previous section. Critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration are key to successful R D programs in industrial laboratories. 

Because innovation requires continual collaboration, workers in the 21st century no longer can rely on the expertise they learned early in life to keep them at the forefront of the skills queue. 

T-shaped professional may be very good at collaboration, and good innovators, solving new problems in their area of depth as well. Like H-shaped people though, it takes a lot of time to master complex communication skills across a breadth of... 

Innovation does not happen by itself it requires environments where people with different backgrounds and skills come together and work together to create both sought-after solutions as well as unexpected solutions. An important aspect of the development in the field of smart textiles is to create opportunities for multidisciplinary and intersectoral meetings and collaborations to take advantage of the opportunities for smart textiles. This is the exciting future of smart textiles. 

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