Building Collaborative Innovation Capability

OVERVIEW:Product innovation and supply chain process innovation efforts have traditionally been managed as separate activities. Today, collaborative innovation approaches seek to integrate them. The effect is to fully develop and exploit supply chain capabilities, radically improving the value propositions materialized by products. However, the advent of collaborative innovation is hampered by limitations in supporting processes and infrastructure. Technical and organizational barriers frequently make higher levels of collaboration difficult. Fortunately, new management approaches and information technology solutions can help firms overcome these barriers. In particular, emerging product life-cycle management (PLM) systems offer important tools for overcoming barriers associated with distance, access, lack of institutional memory, and awareness. Successful leveraging of these systems, however, usually requires changes in organizational values, processes and metrics.