Crafting a Collaborative Blueprint: Key Dimensions for Corridors

Corridors are a way to view and organise collaborative activities between regions. More specifically, an Interregional Innovation Corridor is defined as a (bi-)directional collaboration channel between two or more regions, connected via key regional stakeholders (orchestrators), in which continuous exchange of industrial and research capacities takes place. The level and intensity of collaboration can vary from ad-hoc to full integration.

There are a number of elements that should be discussed and established in the setup of a corridor. To support stakeholders in assessing and building their collaboration, we propose a reference architecture. This architecture outlines the key elements that should be discussed among collaborating partners. The Corridor has actions at the core, supported by five dimensions: mission, governance, culture, participation, and funding. These dimensions are a coherent categorization of the key factors which may be changed to better support the actions—forming the backbone of the collaboration.

For each of these dimensions and depending on the level of collaboration, the corridor nodes can select key elements to develop as well as KPIs to monitor and drive the collaboration activities. Not all of these dimensions will be settled at the early collaboration levels, but by discussing each dimensions, the collaborating partners to take a 360 degree view of their collaboration and potentially address weak points.