Collaborative Architectures for Innovation

Collaborative innovation has become a hot topic in innovation today. Scholars, consultants, and the business press all urge companies seeking to boost innovative performance to become more "collaborative." Too often, however, companies fail to distinguish among the various choices they face with respect to alternative modes of collaboration. Collaborative innovation can take a wide variety of forms, each with profound implications for innovative performance and the value a firm can capture from innovation. Building on a number of case studies, this paper presents a simple framework for categorizing different collaborative modes. The framework is based on the notion that there are two critical dimensions along which collaborative efforts can be characterized. The first dimension relates to the degree to which the collaborative network is "open" verses "closed." The second dimension relates to the degree to which the governance structure for collaboration is "hierarchical" verses "flat." While discussions of collaborative innovation often take the position that "open" networks are superior to "closed" networks, and that "flat" governance structures are superior to "hierarchical" structures, our framework provides a more nuanced view of the trade-offs. The choice among alternative collaborative modes should be driven by a number of factors including characteristics of the technology, the capabilities of the firm, and the distribution of competences in the environment. We develop a set of guidelines for helping firms choose among collaborative models and discuss critical enabling conditions required for each to work in practice. In the final section of the paper, we discuss how firms can "mix and match" multiple modes of collaboration into coherent "architectures" that lie at the heart of innovation strategy.