digital collaboration

With the advent of digitalization, prevailing paradigms – such as product centricity, face-to-face collaboration and hierarchical structures – are giving way to the vision of data-driven business models, digital, collaborative ecosystems and an agile, holacratic way of working in flat hierarchies and self-managing teams. Collaboration is made possible through the use of software solutions. In addition to adapted management concepts, the digital space also requires a digital cultural understanding on part of the companies involved. Lean empowerment is a pioneering approach to collaboration based on cultural values. In expert workshops, ideas were developed to explore how these values can be lived in a digital culture and thus in terms of global digital collaboration. This article presents concrete solutions from which requirements for digital collaboration and for implementation within IT structures and software solutions in particular can be derived.

Addressing future challenges by means of innovation requires organizations to work together to a much larger degree than today, requiring both physical (‘colocated’) and digital collaboration. This collaboration for innovation often goes beyond single organizations and results in networks of shared value creation comprising different actors such as companies, research institutions, or supporting actors. These ecosystems of innovation transcend geographical and organizational boundaries and are enabled by the use of virtual tools. Our article is set out to capture the spectrum between colocated and digital collaboration in innovation ecosystems by introducing the concept of ecosystem virtuality. Specifically, we look at the degree of technology dependence, informational value, and temporal dispersion, and propose key antecedents of ecosystem virtuality such as geographical dispersion, boundary conditions such as the level of trust among actors, and how these factors influence the ...