Sometime in mid-2007, I received an invite from Professor Ramesh Sharda of Oklahoma State University, the Series Editor of the Annals of Information Systems (AoIS), to guest edit a volume in the AoIS series. I had just finished writing my new book on collaborative innovation, The Global Brain (Wharton School Publishing, 2007) and one of the topics I had dealt with in that book related to the role of information technology (IT) in facilitating inter-organizational collaborative innovation. I had also written an opinion piece on the topic of IT and product development in MIS Quarterly in 2003. As such, I was quite interested in exploring this topic further and an AoIS edited volume seemed a natural vehicle for that. I submitted a proposal outlining this idea and it was readily accepted by the Series Editor at Springer.