Organizing Collaboration in Inter-Organizational Innovation Networks, from Orchestration to Choreography

Innovation networks constitute a valid structure within which to foster members' abilities to interact and cooperate, in order to reduce environmental uncertainty and face the challenges that derive from economic change. Network members take advantage of their participation in the system by creating and extracting value when performing certain deliberate and purposeful activities. Traditionally the interactions between network members are represented in a hierarchical structure with a prominent member performing a leadership role in managing the system. Recently, more complex organizations have emerged in which the power of the decisions is spread among all partners. In this paper, we overcome the single hub model and propose a new organizational framework called “choreography”, which takes into account all network members, extending the roles of coordination and management throughout the entire network. We consider a real inter-organizational innovation network as an eligible case study which supports the choreography model.