John Hagel and John Seely Brown published an article in The McKinsey Quarterly (free registration required) discussing the power of various flavors of collaboration play in fostering innovation in an organization.

Hagel also discusses this in a blog post here.

Hagel says:

...we focus specifically on the institutional mechanisms required to catalyze and focus innovation initiatives within these creation nets. Unfortunately, much of the coverage of open innovation tends to emphasize self-organizing and emergent behavior, leaving executives with the impression that there is nothing that can be done to shape or focus efforts in this arena. While creation nets critically depend on emergent practices for their success, we found that these creation nets display an interesting blend of managed and emergent activity.