Improving distributed innovation processes in virtual organisations through the evaluation of collaboration intensities

Abstract

Distributed innovation processes (DIPs) are considered a new option to handle both the growing complexity of new products and services and the speed in which they need to be brought to the market. Apparently, DIPs – if conducted in a complementary way – have a positive influence on the innovation cycle regarding quality and development times. However, research has paid little attention to DIPs in collaborative networks (CNs) in the past. CNs, one of them being highly dynamic virtual organisations, could provide an ideal foundation for such DIPs. With the presentation of the collaborative network relationship analysis and the analysis of collaboration intensities, this research gap will be addressed. It is shown that a qualitative planning of collaboration intensities can support the management of innovation networks. Case studies from the business sector demonstrate the applicability. Finally, an example illustrates the underlying mechanisms. This article is an extended version of the paper ‘Managing distributed innovation processes in virtual organizations by applying the collaborative network relationship analysis’ presented at PRO-VE’09 (Eschenbächer, J., Seifert, M., and Thoben, K.-D., 2009. Managing distributed innovation processes in virtual organizations by applying the collaborative network relationship analysis. In: L.M. Camarinha-Matos, I. Paraskakis, and H. Afsamarnesh, eds. Leveraging knowledge for innovation in collaborative networks. Chennai: IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 13–21).