Welcome to the December 2017 issue of the Technology Innovation Management Review. This month’s editorial theme is Collaboration, and the authors provide insights on the benefits of diverse entrepreneurial teams, the importance of educational collaboration in university–industry relationships, how startups and SMEs can collaborate through open innovation, and how coworking spaces can promote collaborative capability.

In the first article, Franziska Brodack and Anna Sinell from the Fraunhofer Center for Responsible Research and Innovation in Berlin, Germany, discuss the benefits of team diversity on entrepreneurial commitment in academic-spinoffs. Building on literature on interdisciplinarity, academic entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial intention, they analyzed the development of nine interdisciplinary spin-off teams comprising expertise from science, industry, and design. Through their findings, they identify several benefits of interdisciplinarity and put forward a number of propositions about its positive effect on entrepreneurial commitment.

Next, Leena Kunttu from the University of Vaasa in Finland examines the role of educational involvement in innovative university–industry collaboration. Although the value of linking university research with industrial innovation is widely recognized, little attention has been given specifically to the value of involving industry in educational activities such as student projects, thesis projects, jointly organized courses, and tailored degree courses. Through a qualitative analysis of nine cases of university–industry research collaboration, the author demonstrates the mutual benefits of educational involvement.

Then, Fabio Mercandetti, Christine Larbig, Vincenzo Tuozzo, and Thomas Steiner from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts Information Technology in Switzerland highlight the potential for startups to collaborate with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through open innovation. More commonly, startups collaborate with large companies, but the authors’ findings suggest that building bridges between startups and SMEs can reduce the challenges both players face in identifying potential partners and can lead to effective collaboration and innovation solutions.

Finally, Marcelo Castilho and Carlos Quandt from Business School of Pontificia Universidade Católica do Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil, explore the development of collaborative capability in coworking spaces. Based on their study of 14 coworking spaces in six Asian countries, they identify two types of coworking spaces – those tailored towards “convenience sharing” and those supporting “community building” – and argue that they each foster collaborative capability in different ways. They also contribute to a four-dimensional theoretical model for coworking spaces to help coworking founders and community managers make strategic decisions in relation to developing collaborative capability.

The articles in this issue were selected and developed from papers presented at the ISPIM Innovation Conference in Vienna, Austria, from June 18–21, 2017. ISPIM – the International Society for Professional Innovation Management – is a network of researchers, industrialists, consultants, and public bodies who share an interest in innovation management.

Next year’s ISPIM Innovation Conference will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, from June 17–20, 2018. Submissions from academic, research, consulting, industry, intermediary, and policy organizations are encouraged. The submission deadline is January 26, 2018.

Before turning the page on 2017, we return to the December tradition of looking back on the articles that have proven the most popular in the past year. Table 1 ranks the most popular articles published in the 12 issues between October 2016 and September 2017 based on traffic to timreview.ca over this period. This method strongly disadvantages more recently published articles, so the table also includes five trending articles that would appear in the main list if only recent traffic were considered. If you missed any of these articles when they first came out, we encourage you to add them to your reading list. Our full archive of articles is available on our website.

For future issues, we are accepting general submissions of articles on technology entrepreneurship, innovation management, and other topics relevant to launching and growing technology companies and solving practical problems in emerging domains. Please contact us with potential article topics and submissions.

Chris McPhee
Editor-in-Chief

Table 1. Most popular TIM Review articles published from October 2016 to September 2017*

*The rankings are based on website traffic to timreview.ca from October 1, 2016 to September 30, 2017. The list also includes 5 recently published articles (denoted by ↑) that would appear in the main list if only traffic from June 1, 2017 to November 30, 2017 were considered.