Collaboration networks for innovation and Web 2.0: Perfect match?

Global patterns of industrial production benefited from Internet technologies as they enable relocation and control of distant industrial operations and workgroups and the creation of new markets for mass production. In such teams, the amount and diversity of information available is amplified thus enabling a richness of perspectives to problems, ideas, products. Indeed knowledge creation and harnessing collective knowledge are salient features of collaborative innovation. Given the widespread adoption of collaborative technologies as facilitative platforms for informal interactions of contemporary networks, the objective of this research is to examine how such interaction is facilitated through Web 2.0. This research contributes to existing literature by examining how collaborative tools affect the relationships between user contribution and knowledge flow in collaborative networks.