Group innovation : a few practical lessons

An essential phenomenon of the last few decades has been the development of innovations in collaboration with other groups. This is set to increase. In order to understand better the key factors for success, and to decrease the chances of failure, a dozen or so large European companies have created a workgroup within the EIRMA (European Industrial Research Managers' Association). This workgroup has studied sixteen cases of joint collaboration in innovation development using special methods. The lessons to be learnt from this field study concerning the success factors for collaboration do not always confirm what is generally accepted to be the case, and leave a number of unresolved questions.