Collaborative Regional Innovation Initiatives: A Booster for Local Company Innovation Processes?

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that the rate of innovations can be enhanced through interaction between new constellations of actors, crossing borderlines between different mindsets, knowledge and skill bases (e.g. Brown and Duguid, Org Sci 2(1):40–57, 1991; Cooke and Morgan, The associational economy: firms, regions, and innovation, 1998; Leonard-Barton, Wellsprings of knowledge: building and sustaining the sources of innovation, 1995, p. 64; Stamm, Managing innovation, design and creativity, 2008, p. 335). Studies of economic prosperity have also pointed to cooperation and competition between neighboring actors as a driver for competitiveness and innovativeness, be it for a company, a business area or a region (e.g. Piore and Sabel, The second industrial divide: possibilities for prosperity, 1984; Porter, The competitive advantage of nations, 1990). The hypothesis behind the geographical focus is that geographical proximity between actors promotes interaction and hence innovation. In EU, and also in Norway, this has been used actively as guidance in national and regional policy, where construction of innovation systems such as clusters and interorganizational networks are promoted and funded. To get organizations and institutions in a region to collaborate more is seen as the panacea for innovation, transformation and prosperity. However, companies often treat such constructed initiatives as an add-on to their ordinary, often long-lasting, business relationships between customers and suppliers (Håkansson et al., Business in networks, 2009, p. 13). This could imply that the necessary anchoring of such new innovation system initiatives with the companies’ own innovation processes is weak or missing. The terminology system points to the importance of the different elements (actors) in the system, their interrelatedness and their impact on each other (Meadows, Thinking in systems. A primer, 2009). An innovation system, like a network, cannot deliver innovation if the elements (i.e. the companies) of the systems don’t respond with related actions to the common endeavor. However, the different actors’ intraorganizational innovation processes are hardly mentioned in the innovation systems theories, thus lacking the important system feedback link between the intraorganizational innovation processes within the single company and the interorganizational innovation processes which are taking place in the collaborative initiative. In this article it is argued, supported by a case story, that attention to both of these processes and the nexus between them is needed in order to construct sustainable interorganizational innovation system initiatives. A model for this is proposed, based on a dual organization development process, encouraging system feedback loops and thereby bridging the single participating organization and the interorganizational collaborative initiative.