Collaborative Working Environments: Distance factors affecting collaboration

New paradigms such as Open Innovation and User Centred Design as well as User Centred Open Innovation Ecosystem promote a distributed collaboration approach. However, a number of identified distances abundantly described in the literature, raise collaboration barriers which affect the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration. This paper presents the results and discusses the findings of a survey on collaboration barriers, built from a list of collaboration distance factors, which was conducted from June 2007 to June 2008. It also explores the role of Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) and collaboration tools in creating, compressing or bridging collaborative distances and raising or overcoming related collaboration barriers.