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A Systems View Across Time and Space

Table 2 Discourse in the dating phase

From: Social exchange in collaborative innovation: maker or breaker

Exchange of capital—dating phase

Financial capital

I think anybody should be interested to pay for this kind of service.”

…we can decide internally how to price things, in that respect we are also dependent on the pricing of the testbed providers themselves and they don’t have a clue yet how to price… So maybe the first customers will be guinea pigs and we might offer them a service for free just to figure out how things work…. We should have a business model and business plan.

“…we want to become big. I don’t see it right now, but before that I would say first it should run, self-sustained for a couple of years…”

 

…we hope that we convince the industry, especially to commit a certain number of years to financially contribute to this collaboration model.

 

“…we will find a financing model once the first income comes into the collaboration model, in terms of money flow ideally the providers would not have to pay anything.”

Human capital

On the project level, of course there are risks, related to the competencies of the people whether companies send the right people or if, the level of engagement is low or so.

 

I have trust in the people who are doing the technology development.

We have experience of connecting testbeds around the world. We can make it work but this far it has never been easy.

Social capital

I think there is a lot of trust needed to operate this collaboration model for the benefit of all partners. This currently is really based on the social networks or the professional social networks that exist from previous relationships, from previous projects and generally the engagement of all partners in different forms of collaboration over the years. So this is how it currently works and probably it will work if we succeed to create this collaboration model and operate it and, on a sustainable basis.

 

…we have very good collaboration with project partners in the past and we still have that.

“…we know them and we have worked with them before.”

We have developed those relationships over a number of years.

 

…competition isn’t an issue as it would be for other organizations. I think the businessmen in our cluster would actually be very happy to work with a lot of the partners…

“This is a good project from the idea that people meet and they know each other’s companies, testbeds and R&D.”

 

I had close collaboration with the project management in the past and this is how we got into this collaboration…we have participated with other partners in several projects before. I’m here for collaborating in a specific technical area, it’s much easier for me to do with somebody that I know.

 

If the organizations changes and people change their positions inside the organizations, you have to build trust over and over again, with different people. Sometimes in big companies if you loose one contact it takes a year or two to find another who is in charge of that business area. That’s hard work.”

Innovation capital

Currently we have no major risks, the competition is certainly not a risk. All partners accept the fact that it is pre-competitive collaboration and even if the collaboration model creates a business case for some organization I think most of the organizations engaged, are convinced that they create an entity, a facility that is of the long term benefit of the whole industry.

I would say that technology risk is lower, knowing the other partners.

 

…you get access to others resources around Europe.

…if the customers can rely on and trust the collaboration model it’s useful, then they are going to use resources provided by the collaboration model and then the business model will work. If people chose the collaboration model they will pay and will help to maintain the collaboration model. If you can trust the resources then maybe you will use it.”