Exploring actors' heterogeneity in innovative projects

This paper explores the role of actors’ heterogeneity in the development of innovative projects. An increasing number of studies suggest that innovation is created by the interplay of different and committed stakeholders, where the innovation activities of the firm must take account the complementary innovation activities of others in the network.This has lead to the emergence of the concept of innovation network, and the related concern of how innovation networks are composed by. In this paper we study the roles of actors’ heterogeneity in the development of collaborative innovation, a research area recently highlighted as relevant in marketing studies, but with scarce empirical evidence to support it. We developed the case of two innovative projects related to mechatronics where the innovative outcome developed in the first has been applied in the second to develop a further innovation. By using the six sources of heterogeneity by Corsaro et al. (2012) –goals, competences and skills, knowledge bases, power and position, perceptions and cultures– we find out the processes which describe the role of actors’ heterogeneity both in the development of collaborative innovation (de-contextualizing of the joint innovative outcome with respect to the different actors’ specific features) and in its application (re-contextualizing of the innovative outcome into the specific context of each actor).