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Abstract: Over the years a great variety of collaborative innovation concepts and methodologies with varying names, conflicting and overlapping definitions have been presented. In this study collaborative innovation related term variations are identified by utilizing cross disciplinary literature review and snowballing sampling approaches. Visual text analysis is conducted by creating semantic network between the identified terms. The dominating terms are identified by evaluating the popularity of the scanned terms based on the number of publications associated with the terms in Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar (GS). As a result, a total of 97 different terms formed on the basis of 67 different words were identified. The top 20 most popular terms based on WoS and GS title search results are presented. The semantic connections between the terms are visualized including nodes sizes based on degree centrality and terms popularity as well as grouping based on Louvain method.
Keywords: collaborative innovation, literature review, semantic network analysis, participatory; community; citizen; public; crowd, engagement, participation
1 Introduction
The confusion relating parallel and overlapping terminology is one of the key problems in many scientific research domains. This phenomenon can easily lead to a risk of not recognizing studies conducted under another terminology or research domain even if the studies could be highly relevant (e.g. Garcia & Calantone, 2002). The innovation research community is not immune to this phenomenon. For example, numerous overlapping radical innovation terms have been coined even if the terms definitions are grounded on identical attributes (Santonen et al. 2016).
Collaborative innovation - a concept associated with the process of engaging various stakeholders to innovate collaboratively - has in recent years gained increasing interest (e.g. Baldwin and Von Hippel, 2011; Sørensen, and Torfing, 2011). Dictionary definition for collaborative term refers to involving two or more people working together for a special purpose (Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus, collaborative entry) or to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavour (Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, collaborative entry) or a piece of work produced by two or more people or groups working together (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, collaborative entry). The collaborative innovation concept belongs to the family of open innovation concepts, a term coined by Chesbrough (2006) to emphasise collectively conducted research, development and innovation...