Innovation has become the main source of competitive advantage for European companies in the globalised economy. Existing collaborative working environments (CWEs) mainly focus on supporting traditional working paradigms of linear workflows by providing IT-based platforms for planning, scheduling and executing tasks. However, in order to achieve continuous strategic innovation and thus create persistent competitive advantage, organisations need to increase their capacity for carrying out open-ended and nonlinear problem solving involving a wide participation of people in knowledge-rich environments. This must be supported by the next generation CWE's, which in turn, requires new paradigms for managing the knowledge transfer, the social dynamics, and the decision processes involved in the front-end of innovation.

The goal of Laboranova is to create this next generation Collaborative Tools which will change existing technological and social infrastructures for collaborating and support knowledge workers and eProfessionals in sharing, improving and evaluating ideas systematically across teams, companies and networks. Laboranova will do research to develop and integrate models and tools in three specific areas, the three pillars in the project: ideation, connection and evaluation and decision making. These pillars will be leveraged by advanced game methodologies in order to improve collaborative work processes.

By integrating these efforts the results will be innovative collaboration approaches and organisational models for managing early innovation processes, software prototypes and the integration of the isolated models and tools into a Collaborative Innovation Platform. This will change the way knowledge work is done and increase the innovative output of companies.