Analyses of collaborative innovation activities throughout the stages of innovation process

The aim of this study is to analyse collaborative innovation activities based on the different stages of innovation process. There are various studies that examine determinants of collaborative innovation with regards to involvement of different types of actors, national differences and technological factors. This study examines collaborations focusing on three main stages that are input, transformation and output. It adapts these three stages throughout case studies that are within nanotechnology field to identify key issues related to the innovation process. For this study, the key nanotechnology experts who have knowledge and involvement in collaborative innovation were interviewed in the in-depth interviews to capture the required data. The interview data for this research was collected from the UK, the US, China and Germany from 42 experts within academia, industry and intermediaries. Each expert gave an example of collaborative innovation that they involved in within the nanotechnology field. After the collection of the interview data, it is analysed by using the axial hierarchical coding procedure by embedding the findings into the innovation processes. Finally, this study proposes a framework to differentiate various stages of collaborative innovations between academia and industry. Evidently, industrial or academic players do become involved at different stages of an innovation system. The collaborations between them do not start from the beginning of an innovation process, when the idea is generated though sometimes collaboration occurs for intellectual property related issues. Based upon findings, the cases and their determinants are explained according to the input, pre-transformation, transformation, post-transformation and output stages. The results show that there is a great variance between the key success factors of different stages of collaborations. Additionally, national differences were identified with regards to the frequency of actors, involvement within the various stages of collaborative process.