Co-Innovation Platforms: A Playbook for Enabling Innovation and Ecosystem Growth

Strategies and practices for growing ecosystems are increasingly important in shaping industries and markets. Sustaining productive innovation is not just about you. It depends on others as well as your willingness and ability to collaborate effectively. This book is about how to use, as well as develop, a co-innovation platform to accelerate innovation and sustain ecosystem growth. It will show how you, your team and your organization can create and foster collaborative innovation among a diverse set of organizations that are located outside of your company’s hierarchy.

A co-innovation platform provides an environment where firms can combine or recombine ideas to generate novel solutions. A distinctive feature of the co-innovation platform is its resource-open and hands-on approach to innovation. For many organizations, resource limitations, organizational obstacles and/or time constraints kill an idea before it takes shape. By providing access to demand-side and supply-side resources and capabilities to facilitate co-innovation, the platform solves this problem and shapes the ecosystem’s innovation trajectory from the ground up. This book provides strategic and practical guidance for orchestrating collaborative problem solving and ecosystem growth.

Tammy L. Madsen is Professor of Strategy and Innovation and a former Associate Dean at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, USA. She serves on the Board of Governors - Academy of Management (AOM), Board of Advisors of the Global Innovation Institute (GInI) and is the Director of the Strategy Research Foundation’s Dissertation Grant Program, Strategic Management Society.
David Cruickshank is Vice President of SAP multi-Cloud Service Operations at SAP.