Collaborative Innovation Centers (CICs): Toward Smart Service System Design

This paper begins to integrate the technical literature on smart service systems with the more established policy literature on industry, academic, government collaborations. IBM’s existing Collaborative Innovation Centers (CICs) serve to ground the discussion in practice. CICs are an example of a Triple Helix smart service system, designed to rapidly close skills gaps and to accelerate the growth of high-skill jobs, essential to regional economic development and quality of life in knowledge economies. As such, this paper further provides insight into CIC design methodology and comparison with alternate types of collaborative centers highlighting differentiated design dimensions.