Collaborative innovation: a technological perspective

• Published in: International Journal of Innovation (São Paulo) 2022-05, Vol.10 (2), p.204-211
• Main Authors: Pigola, Angelica, da Costa, Priscila Rezende, Mazieri, Marcos Rogerio, Scafuto, Isabel Cristina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alliances; Collaboration; Cooperation; Game theory; Innovations; Institutionalization; Knowledge; Management science; Organization theory; R&D; Research & development; Research facilities; Strategic management; Technological change; Technology
• ISSN: 2318-9975; 2318-9975
• DOI: 10.5585/iji.v10i2.22256

Collaborative innovation become one of the most strategy decision across firms and a well-defined phenomenon that became popular among practitioners and researchers (A. S. Cui O’Connor, 2012; Liu et al., 2017). Many theories were considered to explain collaboration phenomena such as resources-based view, organization theory, strategy, information processing theory, the economic theory of complementarities among others (Barney, 1991; Cassiman Veugelers, 2006; Daft Lengel, 1986; Milgrom Roberts, 1995; Tushman Nadler, 1978). However, technology advances provide new variations in collaboration to innovativeness. For example, collaborative activities with suppliers and customers (Karhade Dong, 2021),  community source projects (Liu et al., 2017) or collaboration with distant partners (T. Cui et al., 2020), corporate engagement with startups (Shankar Shepherd, 2019), innovation networks (Aarikka-Stenroos et al., 2017), and innovation ecosystems (Granstrand Holgersson, 2020).Collaborative innovation takes over the existence of an inter-organizational activities executed by people that together perform with high level of interdependence something innovative (T. Cui et al., 2020; Davis Eisenhardt, 2011). Some authors (Adner Kapoor, 2010; T. Cui et al., 2020; Rico et al., 2008) highlight that this interdependence is characterized along two dimensions: technological and behavioral. Technological interdependence is linked to knowledge and the exchange of resources for research and development, and behavioral interdependence is associated with the field of communication, social interaction between collaborative actors and the coordination of these relationships to innovate.Other perspectives in the literature explain and theorize about collaborative innovation as knowledge-sharing trajectories (Majchrzak Malhotra, 2016; Trkman Desouza, 2012), or multi-actor collaboration (Torfing, 2019), or building collaborative capabilities (Swink, 2006) among other approaches. In this editorial, we bring some thoughts and idea about collaborative innovation under a technological perspective to incentive researchers to go beyond in innovative technologies research embedded in collaboration.Collaboration efforts also became a common way of firms to enhance innovations and its technological development with clear determinants about their beneficial effects, and therefore, the literature is well stablished in this subject (Pereira et al., 2018). However, collaboration only succeeds when