Collaborative Innovation Networks

Collaborative innovation networks are cyberteams of motivated individuals, and are self-organizing emergent social systems with the potential to promote health, happiness and individual growth in real-world work settings. This book describes how to identify and nurture collaborative innovation networks in order to shape the future working environment and pave the way for health and happiness, and how to develop future technologies to promote economic development, social innovation and entrepreneurship. The expert contributions and case studies presented also offer insights into how large corporations can creatively generate solutions to real-world problems by means of self-organizing mechanisms, while simultaneously promoting the well-being of individual workers. The book also discusses how such networks can benefit startups, offering new self-organizing forms of leadership in which all stakeholders are encouraged to collaborate in the development of new products.

This unique book reveals how Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) can be used to achieve resilience to change and external shocks. COINs, which consist of 'cyberteams' of motivated individuals, are self-organizing emergent social systems for coping with external change. The book describes how COINs enable resilience in healthcare, e.g. through teams of patients, family members, doctors and researchers to support patients with chronic diseases, or by reducing infant mortality by forming groups of mothers, social workers, doctors, and policymakers. It also examines COINs within large corporations and how they build resilience by forming, spontaneously and without intervention on the part of the management, to creatively respond to new risks and external threats. The expert contributions also discuss how COINs can benefit startups, offering new self-organizing forms of leadership in which all stakeholders collaborate to develop new products.

Publisher Description

In Economics, networks are increasingly used to describe the many links created between independent companies, as well as between them and other institutions (universities, banks, venture capital, etc.). In the current global and knowledge-based economy, they can be characterised as knowledge factories and knowledge boosters. They feed the internal processes of innovation (collaborative innovation) or the external processes of innovation, created by the propagation effects that come from inter-firm collaboration. The book explains how innovation networks are at the origin of the production of new knowledge that will be transformed and used in common as well as in separated production processes. This characteristic of networks as knowledge factories gives incentives to further investment in the production of knowledge and ensures the cumulativeness of the innovation process. Some of the authors clearly take a territorial point of view and study how clusters (in different parts of the world: Europe, Eastern Asia and North America) propelled by the quality of the innovation networks they enclose, can be characterised as knowledge pools into which the local actors will be able to draw to reinforce their individual and collective competitiveness. This book also includes analyses of the quality of the networks built within clusters, which may help their identification.

The future of business is swarm business – whether it’s at Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, or Apple, it’s not about being a fearless leader, but about creating a swarm that works together in collective consciousness to create great things and reinvent your business.

The future of business is swarm business – whether it’s at Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, or Apple, it’s not about being a fearless leader, but about creating a swarm that works together in collective consciousness to create great things and reinvent your business.

This volume is focused on the emerging concept of Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs). COINs are at the core of collaborative knowledge networks, distributed communities taking advantage of the wide connectivity and the support of communication technologies, spanning beyond the organizational perimeter of companies on a global scale. It includes the refereed conference papers from the 6th International Conference on COINs, June 8-11, 2016, in Rome, Italy. It includes papers for both application areas of COINs, (1) optimizing organizational creativity and performance, and (2) discovering and predicting new trends by identifying COINs on the Web through online social media analysis. Papers at COINs16 combine a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems and the psychology and sociality of collaboration, and intercultural analysis through the lens of online social media. They will cover most recent advances in areas from leadership and collaboration, trend prediction and data mining, to social competence and Internet communication.