Fostering Innovation Networks: the Case of a Brazilian Company.

The formation of collaboration networks has emerged as an important sustainable innovation strategy for companies. It has been given more value to build long-term relationships in which knowledge and technologies developed are able to add value in more phases of the innovation cycle rather than on specific inventions or ideas captured in the early innovation stage. Natura, Brazil's largest cosmetics company is practitioner of the collaborative open innovation model and was defined as object of this paper. It was developed a diagnostic of its partnerships with research institutions and presented the results of an action research that resulted in a new model of collaboration focusing on shared value creation over the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]