Collaborative Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE)

Collaboration requires organizations to manage multiple stakeholders in various interorganizational relations that are increasingly important for firm survival but also necessary to address grand societal challenges and achieve sustainable transformation in industries. The importance of collaborative partnerships is embodied in UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17, that targets the global need to partner for finance, technology, capacity building, knowledge, and expertise to realize the 16 other SDGs.

CIE focuses on several research themes including: open innovation, responsible and inclusive innovation, community/cooperative entrepreneurship and multilateral or bilateral interorganizational relations such as supply chain relations. It is firmly rooted in the context of responsible, social or sustainable business and builds on a track record of current and past research projects and publications. Currently in the Collaborative Networks for Sustainability project, funded by NWO SIA RAAK Pro, DiVito and her research team are studying collaborative value creation and value capture in multistakeholder collaborations focused on circular transformation in the textile industry. A key process of collaborative value creation and value capture is orchestration and key questions include: who orchestrates collaborative partners and how do they orchestrate the partners to achieve collective goals. These orchestration roles and processes lie outside traditional firm boundaries and a better understanding of them is needed to improve the positive impact and results of multistakeholder collaborations.