Explaining interactions in collaborative innovation arrangements: How organizations influence their representatives’ interactions in collaborative innovation arrangements

Innovation through collaboration has been increasingly adopted to tackle complex social issues. As a result, the development of public sector innovations is to a lesser degree an ‘in-house’ matter and public sector innovations are increasingly more developed in collaborative arrangements that force organizations to interact across organizational borders. Despite the growing body of literature on collaborative innovation, little is known about the influence of organizations on the interactions of their members when they are acting on behalf of their organization in such collaborative arrangements. Through social network analysis, we examine how organizations influence the eagerness of their representatives in arrangements for collaborative innovation to engage in interactions outside official meetings with other participants. We found that the representative’s freedom to act and the extent to which the higher-level managers of the own organization sees the innovation project as a priority stimulates the extent to which the representative interacts with other participants in the arrangement. Moreover, reciprocity and having a coordinating role in the process determines interaction as well.