Collaborative Innovation Networks: Latest Insights from Social Innovation, Education, and Emerging Technologies Research

Collaborative innovation networks are cyberteams of motivated individuals, and are self-organizing emergent social systems with the potential to promote health, happiness and individual growth in real-world work settings.

This book describes how to identify and nurture collaborative innovation networks in order to shape the future working environment and pave the way for health and happiness, and how to develop future technologies to promote economic development, social innovation and entrepreneurship. The expert contributions and case studies presented also offer insights into how large corporations can creatively generate solutions to real-world problems by means of self-organizing mechanisms, while simultaneously promoting the well-being of individual workers. The book also discusses how such networks can benefit startups, offering new self-organizing forms of leadership in which all stakeholders are encouraged to collaborate in the development of new products.

Yang Song is an Associate Professor at the Economics School of Jilin University in China. She holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship and Social Networks from the University of Amsterdam and is an expert and the Director of the International Collaboration and Exchange Office of China Future Industry 100 (supervised by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China). She has collaborated closely with the University of Amsterdam, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the University of Bremen and has published several papers on entrepreneurship and collaborative innovation networks in leading journals, including the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Journal of Science and Technology Policy Management, and the International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering.

Francesca Grippa is a Full Teaching Professor and Faculty Director at Northeastern University. She holds a PhD in e-Business Management from the University of Salento, Italy, and was a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Center for Digital Business. Her research interests include collaborative innovation networks, entrepreneurship and change management. Dr Grippa is member of a research project at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence that focuses on the application of dynamic network analysis to investigate the diffusion of innovation.

Peter A. Gloor is a Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT, where he leads a project exploring collaborative innovation networks. He holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Zurich and was a Postdoc at the MIT Lab for Computer Science. He is also the founder and Chief Creative Officer of the software company galaxyadvisors, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Cologne and Jilin University, Changchun, China. He was previously a partner at Deloitte and PwC, and a manager at UBS. His most recent books are Sociometrics and Human Relationships and Swarm Leadership and the Collective Mind.

João Leitão is an Associate Professor at the University of Beira Interior (UBI), Portugal, and holds a postdoctoral qualification in Technological Change and Entrepreneurship. He is also an Associate Researcher at the CEG-IST, University of Lisbon (Portugal) and External Research Fellow at Instituto Multidisciplinar de Empresa, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. He is the author or co-author of several scientific books on benchmarking, clusters, cooperation networks, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education, innovation, competitiveness and quality of life. He is also the co-editor of the Springer book series Studies on Entrepreneurship, Structural Change and Industrial Dynamics.