Innovation Communities: A New Concept for New Challenges

This chapter introduces the concept of “innovation communities” and explains why it is helpful for successfully managing radical innovation projects in the light of changing innovation framework conditions, providing the basic conceptual background of the book. Section 1.1 describes new challenges to innovation processes through increased dynamics, complexity and increased division of labour. Because of this fundamental change in framework conditions, self-organizing networks have become the dominant innovators for complex technological and systems solutions. Practical experience and empirical research in innovation management have shown that cooperation and efficient networking are important success factors in (nearly) all innovation processes. At the same time, key persons like entrepreneurs and their relevance for initiating and implementing of innovations have been a major focus of start-up policy makers, venture capitalists, innovation incubators, and innovation researchers. However, so far, only little empirical evidence exists on the cooperation of key persons across organizational borders and across different levels of innovation systems. Against this background, Sect. 1.2 describes shortfalls of existing theories and introduces conceptual sources for cross-organizational and cross-level networks of transformational leaders. Section 1.3 further establishes the new concept of “innovation communities”. On the basis of extended promotor theory and the concept of three-level innovation systems, the term “innovation communities” is here used in the sense of promotor networks, or informal personal networks of innovators.