COLLABORATION AND OTHER FACTORS INFLUENCING INNOVATION IN AUSTRALIAN BUSINESSES (DIISR)
Synopsis
This research paper presents the results of an econometric investigation into innovation novelty, collaboration and related characteristics in Australian businesses using micro-data from the ABS 2003 Innovation Survey.
Many innovations, especially those of a more complex nature, seem commonly to take place in conjunction with collaboration. The range of skills and knowledge required to successfully carry out innovation often means that an innovating business may be forced to seek complementary skills to those already held in-house. Such a business may seek external skills and experience in one or more of various areas including R & D, systems modification, specialist manufacturing, or branding and marketing.
It could also be expected that collaboration might be more common and more important to 'frontier' or 'creative' innovation (products or processes that are 'new to the world') than 'adaptive' innovation (modification of goods and services or processes already introduced elsewhere but which are 'new to Australia' or 'new to the industry' but not 'new to the world') and purely 'adoptive' innovation (adopting the manufacturing/sale of goods and or services, or the introduction of processes which are 'new to the businesses' in question but which have already been introduced elsewhere).
Compiled by Kirsten Nielsen, Fieldstone Alliance. January 2003.
The following resources deal directly with the topic of collaboration or are resources deemed useful to collaborations and collaboration consultants. The sources for these are listed at the end of this document. At the end of each entry below, a number in parentheses is keyed to one of the sources listed at the end of the document. Sources include books published by the Wilder Foundation and respondents to an e-mail sent to contacts with collaboration expertise.
Some of the resources were provided with a description of the content, which we've included. It would be a mistake to assume that those resources without an annotation are less useful. The presence or absence of an annotation simply reflects what we received from the source.
This tool will help you assess how your collaboration is doing on 20 research-tested success factors. When you complete this inventory, you will receive summary scores for each of these factors.
As a consultant I'm often asked, “Why do some collaborations succeed and others fail?” As you can imagine, there are many factors involved (see Twenty Factors Influencing Collaboration Successbelow). However, having consulted with more than 50 collaborations in the past ten years, I've identified four keys that—while not a guarantee to success—are essential to a well-functioning collaboration. Those keys are:
