The figure depicts the levels of collaboration between actor groups in the Management Innovation Ecosystem (MIE), in which the MI Lab serves as an organizing rather than commanding body. At each stage of the system shown under a yellow arrow, at least three actor groups collaborate through an exchange of contributions aligned with the expertise and their mission in the society depicted under green and reflexive arrows. This collaboration breeds the defined output under green notes.
The extended framework of MI Lab provides an overview of all the stages, the stakeholder groups, and their contributions (tasks) of each of them at every stage, which are additional to the research impact evaluation.
For instance, at the agenda setting stage of MI, the MI Lab collaborates with Prime Partners and the Operators of validation under the motivation of emerging and new threats and opportunities affecting business conduct, thus urging new research. While not intended to depict the complexity of MI, the synergic system emphasizes the difficulty of translating research into problem-solving products and services for an isolated system. There are successful cases such the one raised in the interview. In most instances, success depends on the choices of people, especially the founder and the resolve of the professors to mentor, inspire, and invest in the ideas of his students. This brings out the concept of fundraising capability required to translate the generated thoughtful ideas into business solutions, such as viable entrepreneurial startups. Cooperation strategy in the MI environment implied setting a platform for new ideas and approaches of various actors both internal and external ones. The MI Lab abides with the necessity of an instrumental purpose that spearheads new value creation and experience for all stakeholders.
The move is consistent with Hagel and Brown (2013) arguing that institutional innovation constituted a shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning, such that organizations can become more adept at generating richer innovations at other levels, including products, services, business models, and management systems. The design of the MI Lab, therefore, must incorporate the critical areas of mutual support, learning, and collaboration between university’s business schools and private businesses.
The BMIL brings together resources in the form of industry, university, and government organizations, as well as individual Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to resolve challenges imposed on the impoverished.
Application of the MI Cooperative Framework model facilitates collaboration by providing workspaces to share information, gathering research from respected SMEs to generate ideas and, finally, exploiting the research findings by applying them to other situations.
Passion the only requirement! If visitors and participants are passionate about working in an area, then they should put in a request to BMIL and a webpage on the requested topic will be created for them. Once created, visitors have access to a network of experts to guide them as they work to resolve important issues.
Bringing together researchers with a variety of backgrounds and unique skill sets, BMIL participants have access to a wealth of information and research concepts that can be applied to resolve challenges faced by developing countries.
By offering participants shared workspaces to work in, together, within the context of a Cooperative Framework model, the BMIL supports problem resolution by encouraging researchers to engage with each other as solutions to real world problems are developed.