Actors’ Heterogeneity in Innovation Networks: The ESASIM and NeWTeCH projects

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the shift from innovation as a firm level phenomenon to a networked one. Innovation is more and more considered a collective process that involves a multitude of business actors, sometimes very different among them, such as companies, universities, private research centers, governmental institutions, and many others. This has lead to the emergence of the concept of innovation network, and the related concern of how innovation networks are composed by. In this paper we study the roles of actors’ heterogeneity in the development of collaborative innovation, a research area recently highlighted as relevant in marketing studies, but with scarce empirical evidence to support it. We developed the case of two projects –ESASIM and NeWTech– where the innovative outcome (simulation software) developed in the first has been applied in the second to develop a further innovation (wireless sensors). By using the six sources of heterogeneity by Corsaro et al. (2012) –goals, competences and skills, knowledge bases, power and position, perceptions and cultures– we find out the processes which describe the role of actors’ heterogeneity both in the development of collaborative innovation (de-contextualizing of the joint innovative outcome with respect to the different actors’ specific features) and in its application (re-contextualizing of the innovative outcome into the specific context of each actor). Even if our findings are preliminary, important marketing implications arise from our study.