Managing diversity of collaborative innovation projects

Staying competitive in dynamic and globalized markets is one of the main challenges for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). For coping with this challenge, collaboration with partners is an essential success factor. In the resulting networks, SMEs share risks to conjointly develop innovative products by combining resources and their core competences. Even though fundamental research and also industrial best practices prove the value of collaboration for innovation, there is still a lack in efficiency and effectiveness within SME networks. As a consequence, methodological and technological support for the management of collaborative activities and in particular the immanent diversity within development networks is needed. Based on a recently developed holistic collaboration model, which describes the structural and procedural foundation for innovation in networks, this paper presents methods and tools to successfully manage the diversity of SME networks especially in context of their evolution from development towards production. Thus, this paper further elaborates on the overall Smart Networking concept known from former publications and contributes newly developed methods and tools for managing diversity of collaborative innovation projects.