Planning distributed innovation processes in virtual organisations by applying the Collaborative Network Relationship Analysis

The planning of distributed innovation processes in virtual organisations is a necessary step in the development of new and advanced products and services. In the past most research on innovation processes were focused on multinational companies with an intra-organisational perspective. The phenomena of innovation processes in networks - with an inter-organisational perspective - have been almost neglected. Collaborative networks are a new application field for such distributed innovation processes where specifically the Virtual Organisation (VO) offers a high potential for new business opportunities. With the Collaborative Network Relationship Analysis (CNRA) this gap is addressed. It is shown that a qualitative planning of collaboration intensities can support business cases by proving both knowledge and planning data. The consolidated findings of Social Network Analysis (SNA) will be used as basis. A formalised example shows that certain aspects used in the SNA can be re-utilized resulting in the proposal of a new indicator addressing the CNRA.