Challenges to Firms' Collaborative Innovation Facing the Innovation Babel Tower

Abstract

Access to different internal and external knowledge sources and learning constitute key dimensions of firms' innovation capabilities to the maintenance of their competitive advantage. The increasing emergence of new modes of innovation involving a diversity of multi-stakeholder collaborations between industry, business, academy and civil society represents a challenge not only to firms' collaborative behaviour but the way to organize, integrate and manage new innovative capabilities. In this context this chapter: a) explores and characterizes the different types of innovation ‘underlying' in the current Innovation Tower of Babel and its implications to the firms' cooperative innovation strategy and knowledge governance and b) provides examples of new target organization models, such as living labs and other ‘innovation labs' where these types of innovations are being developed.