Scaling Innovations through Collaboration

This role-playing exercise aims to tackle issues related to inter-organizational collaboration to scale up innovations. The role-playing experience helps learners discover, appreciate, and learn to govern inherent tensions in inter-organizational collaboration. The exercise is set in the Canadian auto parts industry, which could benefit tremendously from more sophisticated robotic technology to assist the manufacturing process. The role play asks learners to engage in an inter-organizational collaboration agreement. Each participant will represent a company whose in-house knowledge, resources or capabilities can contribute to developing a robot.

This role-play can be used at undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels. It is beneficial as part of a sequence that includes exercises or articles that help set up this experience, demonstrating complex problems, and that then follow up to explore the implications of lessons learned in the role-play for devising ecologies of solutions that tackle complex or systemic problems. The role-play is targeted at courses on strategy, innovation, systems thinking, problem solving, decision-making, and new product development, and can be used as follows:<ul><li>Within innovation courses, it highlights the fundamental tensions between product and business-model innovation.</li><li>Within systems thinking courses, it illustrates how to work through ambiguity without compromising complexity.</li><li>Within strategy courses, it illustrates that some decisions are rife with tensions that cannot be solved but can be navigated.</li><li>Within courses on governance, it differentiate between collaborations lacking a process owner and a concrete outcome, and collaborations that are self-organized without a concrete outcome.</li></ul><br><br>The key objective in this role-play is to embed the advanced automation technologies in the manufacturing process in ways that make business sense. This role-play makes it evident that interorganizational collaborations differ from negotiations in which parties search for winwin solutions. The role-play quickly points to ambiguities in goals and processes and to inherent trade-offs or tensions that cannot easily be negotiated away. It is important to note that no technical knowledge is needed to engage in this role-play. By the end of the exercise, students will be able to<ul><li>position interorganizational collaboration as responses to complex, systems-level problems;</li><li>recognize opportunities for collaboration outside of the common transactional partnerships;</li><li>understand and diagnose the nature of tensions inherent in interorganizational collaboration;</li><li>recognize that most technologies are systems in themselves that require integration;</li><li>attend to the nuances of advanced technologies in terms of innovation, adoption, and scale;</li><li>assess how collaboration processes benefit from determining higher value goals and yet require attention to the details of verification and validation processes; and</li><li>compare the role of central versus distributed leadership in interorganizational collaboration.</li></ul>

• collaboration
• systems thinking
• paradox
• advanced technologies
• distributed leadership
• innovation
• tensions