A new world of collaborative innovation is necessary but brings with it substantial challenges. This briefing looks at how to meet them.

Key findings:

• New forms of collaboration are gaining prominence, e.g. in the forms of open innovation, user-led innovation and collective innovation.
• Collaboration is leading to new ways of working, and the UK has high potential for collaboration.
• But collaboration poses a number of challenges, e.g. many firms don’t realise its importance and lack the resources to pursue it.
• Policy has started to recognise the value of collaboration, but the UK needs to do more to understand and harness it.

Collaboration has always been at the heart of innovation, but meeting the economic and social challenges of the 21st Century will require more extreme partnerships - ones that cross previously sacrosanct organisational, geographical and disciplinary boundaries.

Already, organisations around the world are doing this: experimenting with open source software development, agreeing universal technical standards, and using technology to build previously impossible en masse collaborations that create entirely new products and services.

But this new world of collaborative innovation brings with it substantial challenges. This briefing investigates these challenges and how the UK could respond to them.

Author:
Nesta