The Current Extent and Mode of Interconnection among Innovation Laboratories: An Empirical Study

This paper relates to the assessment of inter-InnoLab collaboration. A qualitative approach in the form of semi-structured expert interviews with a sample of 21 Innovation Laboratory facilitators selected through purposive sampling technique is used to investigate the current extent and mode of interconnection among existing Innovation Laboratories. The findings reveal that the current state of inter-InnoLab collaboration is sparse whereby only few existing InnoLabs exercise exchanging information with others in sporadic physical meetings. The main barriers hindering the inter-InnoLab collaboration are identified as business competition, inadequate information about others’ existence and competencies, and fractional understanding of other types of innovation support. It has been further found that the InnoLabs leverage physical meetings and usual web-based communication tools as primary means for connecting with each other and there is no any particular tool for supporting the inter-InnoLab collaboration process in a dedicated and domain-specific manner