Collaborative innovation in small and medium sized Extended Enterprises

The urgent need to establish own independent innovation processes with strategic impact has drawn attention to Extended Enterprise structures for innovation in the SME context in order to profit of complementary resources and assets. The resulting collaborative innovation processes may be seen as embedded into and driven by networks of self interested interrelated actors. The co-operation between complementary organisations implies both adaptation to environment changes and conflict management between actors with individual interests. A reference framework for such self organising innovation processes in Extended Enterprises is outlined and verified by several innovation case examples.