Overview

Editors: Tim Kastelle
UQ Business School, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD

Firms are increasingly organising their innovation activities around the development of responses to specific challenges or solutions to particular problems. This challenge-led or problem-driven approach represents a new type of innovation process that contrasts with more linear methods of idea generation, selection and development.

In particular, challenge-led innovation provides a sharper focus for new forms of collaboration made possible by the dramatically lowered costs of organisation via the web. This is allowing large, globally dispersed companies such as Proctor & Gamble, Pfizer and IBM to define challenges related to business, social or technical issues and bring together individuals with diverse skills, expertise and perspectives to brainstorm and problem-solve. In this way, web-based tools and the new forms of collaboration they support are making the boundaries of organisations even more porous as groups from inside and outside the organisation can form to address specific challenges.

Other tools such as rapid prototyping and simulation and visualisation applications, including virtual worlds, are facilitating more effective collaboration by allowing geographically dispersed groups to examine, discuss and improve virtual representations of new products, methods and services without the need for physical co-location. These innovation technologies can rapidly and significantly lower the cost of idea development, reducing time to market and improving returns on innovation investments.

This special issue seeks to combine practitioner reports from the 'front line' of collaborative and challenge-led innovation with theoretical and analytical descriptions of these new approaches. We are seeking original papers that:

1. Describe contemporary innovation practice in organisations in terms of collaborative and/or challenge-led innovation; or
2. Develop theoretical or analytical models of collaborative and/or challenge-led innovation; or
3. A combination of the above.

While preference will be given to empirical papers, insightful reviews and conceptual pieces will also be considered. Some possible topics include:

• To what degree can online collaboration replace face-to-face brainstorming and other forms of physical interaction?
• What are the best methods for organising activities around the development of responses to specific challenges or the solution of particular problems?
• What technologies and tools are most effective in supporting collaborative and/or challenge-led innovation?
• Are new metrics needed to measure the benefits of collaborative and/or challenge-led innovation?
• What are the difficulties in facilitating collaboration amongst people with diverse cultures, skill sets, areas of expertise and perspectives?
• How does the rise of problem-driven or challenge-led innovation compare to previous generations of the innovation process employed by organisations?