Learn How to Grasp the Social Dynamics of Collaborative Innovation

By: Innovation Management

Explore the neglected, social dilemmas of innovation: collaboration vs. competition, perfection vs. time-to-market, pragmatic ad-hoc decisions vs. strategy, independence vs. dependence. Despite all rational thought and argument everything depends on the people and the context in which they interact to innovate. We invite you to play in order to learn how to ask better, so that you understand better and can innovate better.

Welcome to join our “research-for-practice” workshop and learn how play helps to discover and explore the social dynamics of innovating together! Try to trust, collaborate, compete, or betray and see what happens without wasting your reputation, loosing your face, or ruining you business. It is just play!

We offer three different opportunities for you to join us;

• Copenhagen – May 24, 2011
• Stockholm – May 26, 2011
• Hamburg – May 31, 2011

Key take-aways from this workshop

In this workshop we invite you to…

• Explore the complex and emergent social dynamics of co-opetition inherent in collaborative, uncertain building processes such as innovation.
• Increase your awareness of how individual action, rules, and group dynamics are interdependent and emerging.
• Learn how play can help you to articulate these intangible aspects of innovation and collaboration.
• Get an introduction to a recently developed, easy to use research tool, which allows you to explore the social dynamics of collaborative innovation.

 

Learn how to grasp the Social Dynamics of Collaborative Innovation and improve your innovation capabilities

Innovation often requires collaboration to get access to different kinds of knowledge inside and outside a firm, e.g. with other departments, firms, experts, or users. Learn to better understand what your collaborators mean, what they want, and how they think and act, in order to better be able to assess whether and how different knowledge is relevant for you. Explore what happens if you have to balance your interests and those of your collaborators. Experience that understanding often means asking the right questions instead of providing answers that are right for you alone.

Does any of the following sound familiar?

• “Why is innovating with others so difficult even if I have all the money and technology I need?”
• “How could this happen, I mean we talked about this?”
• “What are my collaboration partners doing, I thought we have an agreement?”
• “What if I trust this guy? What if I don’t?”
• “That is great! But it’s against the rules. How can anything ever change with these rules anyway?”
• “If I go any further now I loose control, do I really want this?”
• “He is in my team, but nobody understands what he is talking about, what can we do?”

Heard it before? Thought it before? Then our “research-for-practice” workshop is the place to learn how play helps to discover and explore the social dynamics of innovating together! Try to trust, collaborate, compete, or betray and see what happens without wasting your reputation, loosing your face, or ruining you business.

Co-opetition and other social dilemmas of collaborative innovation

Today, almost everybody from the European to the individual level claims that innovation is good, and desirable. However, it is difficult and risky, the majority of all innovations fail either before or shortly after they are implemented. Nevertheless, there is an overwhelming consensus, based on both research and practice, that innovation is the driver of our economy, and key to sustain competitive advantage, and prosperity.

Traditionally, our view on innovation is a technology-minded one, focusing on R&D, technology, measurement and control. This view is still dominant in many places. During the last decades however, the importance of the (more qualitative) social dimension grew, and with it the role of knowledge, for example in Eric von Hippel’s lead-user approach, Chesbrough’s open-innovation theory, and the Scandinavian concept of participatory innovation by Jacob Buur. These approaches address social challenges of innovation. For example, the experience of many people who run innovation projects that no one, absolutely no one seems to really want innovation – neither their bosses, partners, or managers, nor their employees, colleagues or customers.

Why can Practitioners tell so many stories about social challenges when dealing with innovation and the inherent change?  How can we, for example, solve the dilemma of co-opetition, i.e. the mismatch of our own interests and the group interests, when innovating with others? How do we decide between fully exploiting the possibilities and time-to-market? How much freedom, meaning pragmatic ad-hoc decision making, and how much and which strategy, meaning rules, do we need? How willing are we to share or loose control over our resources when we collaborate, and something new emerges? How do we deal with power in collaborative innovation, when shifting knowledge-needs distribute risk and responsibility dynamically?

In short, how can we understand the social shaping of innovation, depending on the particular individuals involved in the unique circumstances? We cannot give you a global solution to that, but we believe we can help you to surface the right questions that help you to create an awareness of the social dynamics of innovation, and better deal with them.

From theory to practice – learning through play Situated learning of social dynamics of participatory innovation through play

The resource of innovation is knowledge, both explicit and tacit, and each domain has its own situated knowledge and practice of how to do things, what is important, and what is right. While some focus on maintaining approved rules and methods to increase efficiency, others might look for promising way to break the rules to increase efficacy. Again others think in technological possibilities and restrictions, in contrast to customer needs. Thus innovation and knowledge are context-dependent on the individuals and how they relate to each other within the specific institutional rules and boundaries of their knowledge domain.

Researchers found that most innovation actually happens at such boundaries between differences, e.g. in interdisciplinary research or cross-functional teams. However, the larger the degree of difference and novelty, the more difficult it is to transfer knowledge between these domains, because the receiver does not understand the meaning the sender intended. In an organizational setting this is dangerous because it leads to frustration and failure, which is mostly not seen as a chance to learn but as proof for inefficiency and inefficacy. However, there is a possibility to explore the complex interplay of individual relating, emerging relations and rules when confronting novelty with mitigated risk – situated play.