Rethinking Forms of Collaboration for Creating Sustainable Innovation and Novelty for a Thriving Future

While being confronted with a hypercomplex, unpredictable, and disruptive world and economy, we are still applying relatively traditional and past-driven approaches to innovation as to how to tackle these new challenges of dealing with a highly uncertain future. One of the main assumptions of these approaches is that (social) collaboration and working together is key in such innovation processes. This conceptual paper will not challenge this assumption, but we will show that this notion of "together" (understood as social collaboration) is far to narrow. Rather, it is suggested to go beyond this understanding and investigate alternative and wider concepts of "together". Three forms of "together"/"co-" will be developed: (i) Being/working together and collaborating with others (socio-epistemic dimension), (ii) being together, interacting and corresponding with the material/world (co-becoming dimension), and (iii) being together with the future as "learning from the future as it emerges". These concepts will be discussed on an conceptual level and we will develop implications concerning new skills and mindsets on an individual and organizational level.