System thinking to understand networked innovation

Abstract

Today, knowledge and the capability to create and utilize it are considered to be the main source of a company's sustainable competitive advantage. Within this assumption, the present paper aims at discussing the advantages of applying a system thinking approach in order to deepen the understanding of the factors that leverage or constrain knowledge transfer to support co-innovation, and its impact at a member level, for instance, in terms of the capacity of generating new ideas, processes and products. The paper’s empirical section is based on one case study pointed to the largest highway concessionaire in Portugal.