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Connect, collaborate, innovate

Published
June 2007

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Description

Collaboration has always been at the heart of innovation, but meeting the economic and social challenges of the 21st Century will require more extreme partnerships - ones that cross previously sacrosanct organisational, geographical and disciplinary boundaries.

Molecular networks

Already, organisations around the world are doing this: experimenting with open source software development, agreeing universal technical standards, and using technology to build previously impossible en masse collaborations that create entirely new products and services.

This new world of collaborative innovation brings with it substantial challenges. Intellectual property regimes were designed primarily to protect the lone inventor and to enable commercialisation by single large corporations.

Collaboration also creates problems for organisations used to 'looking in' rather than 'looking out' and challenges decades-old practices in education and even older social conventions around trust, sharing and attribution.