A participative method for knowledge elicitation in collaborative innovation projects

Abstract

During collaborative innovation projects, interactions between actors and knowledge exchange among them have a crucial role to foster innovation. External knowledge can be integrated into the project through different practices. Thereby, to help companies to identify their best practices, it is necessary to find out where and how external knowledge is acquired, transformed and applied in order to better understand the organisational mechanisms by which firms acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit knowledge. To this end, we propose a new participative method called ISEACAP (Identification, Simulation, Evaluation of Absorptive CAPacity) in order to elicit exchanged knowledge during each part of an innovative project and map the knowledge journey from its integration to its application. The outcome of the method will first help the participants (actors of the innovative project) to better understand and improve their practices for integrating external knowledge. Further, it will help us to reach the way organisational routines will be implemented.