This role-playing exercise aims to tackle issues related to inter-organizational collaboration to scale up innovations. The role-playing experience helps learners discover, appreciate, and learn to govern inherent tensions in inter-organizational collaboration. The exercise is set in the Canadian auto parts industry, which could benefit tremendously from more sophisticated robotic technology to assist the manufacturing process. The role play asks learners to engage in an inter-organizational collaboration agreement. Each participant will represent a company whose in-house knowledge, resources or capabilities can contribute to developing a robot.@en

Society faces many wicked problems today such as climate change, income inequality, and biodiversity loss. Not only has business contributed to these problems but it also plays an important role in addressing them. Problems are “wicked” because they are embedded in complex systems that are continuously evolving. As no single actor can understand and solve a wicked problem, prior research has suggested that multiple actors, such as researchers and managers, come together to cocreate solutions. The cocreation process typically relies on the existing knowledge of the actors involved in the process. Yet, the dynamic nature of wicked problems requires actors to not just rely on cocreating on past knowledge but to cocreate tools that address future emerging or evolving problems. In this paper we seek to explain how researchers and managers can cocreate forward to address wicked problems. We illustrate the concept of cocreating forward through an innovation lab located at a Canadian business school. The lab brings together researchers, managers, and practitioners from various sectors to cocreate corporate innovation processes for addressing wicked problems. By cocreating forward, we show that research, learning, and practice need not be sequential but rather simultaneous activities.@en