Coordinated Attention in Collaborative Innovation

Research and Science foundations worldwide encourage or require collaborative innovation projects involving multiple organizations with different institutional backgrounds, such as firms, universities, or users. These collaborations are supposed to stimulate knowledge flows across boundaries and generate innovative solutions to complex problems. However, we know comparatively little about how the project partners determine the priorities of their search for solutions in the first place and how institutional diversity influences priority setting. Drawing on the attention-based view of organizational behavior, we study attention coordination among partners and the emergence of priorities in joint research grant proposals. We apply content analysis to 227 grant proposals of innovation consortia that received funding in the EU’s Horizon 2020 program and identify distinct patterns of attention allocation. We relate these attention patterns to the institutional composition of the consortia. We find that increasingly diverse consortia shift attention away from technological novelty in grant proposals and towards attention to the innovation ecosystems. Involving SMEs increases a consortiums’ attention to increasingly novel technologies and innovation with large market scope.