Sharing networked innovation approaches across companies

The paper discusses a workshop that has been set up to help companies that are struggling to get networked innovation projects started. In a guided one-day setting, three companies discussed their recent networked innovation cases with each other. A step-by-step approach has been used, starting with baseline interviews prior to the workshop up to a multi-part workshop. By doing so, presenting information from the view of the case owners could be systematically compared to the effects of actively sharing information between professionals from different companies. Departing from the ambitions of each company, external trends, used processes and partners, the goals of each company were discussed. Then, the network that would make the value proposition work, was constructed and alternatives were discussed. We describe the approach of trans-organizational knowledge sharing and the way of analyzing the gathered input. It showed that companies are willing to discuss their problems in depth, given a setting of mutual trust as well as shared understanding. The results also showed that the content of networked innovation projects became richer and more nuanced due to the discussions.