Collaborative Organizations for Innovation: A Focus on the Management of Sociotechnical Imaginaries to Stimulate Industrial Ecosystems

Confronted with the need to improve their innovation capabilities in an increasingly holistic context, companies are creating new forms of collaborative organizations to collectively explore potential radical innovation fields. In this paper, we propose a study of the nature of these new collectives for innovation through two managerial patterns: objects of collaboration and organizational mechanisms of co-ordination. This research is based on longitudinal collaborative research with the French carmaker Renault and analyses the Renault Innovation Community, whose members participated in original collaborative initiatives to stimulate the industrial ecosystem of mobility and support the potential emergence of new ecosystems. The main results of the empirical research emphasize that: (1) tasks of collaboration favour a focus on the regeneration and dissemination of sociotechnical imaginaries rather than on societal expectations, and (2) organizational mechanisms of collaboration exceed open innovation logics to focus on the collective creation of favorable conditions for the emergence of new industrial ecosystems.