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Students are often attentive highly motivated individuals who have good ideas which can provide successful solutions for all parties concerned, but mostly they have no way of bringing in and developing new ideas with other students in order to improve learning and educational processes. To enable collaborative creativity, the eCollaboration-Research Team at the Swiss Distance University of Applied Sciences has developed a solution whereby students or teachers can collaborate and nurture new creative ideas in a structured and guided way. In our solution, this nurturing takes place by means of a collaborative online process in which the "idea seed" will be "cultivated" during various interactive phases as defined by the eCIC method and supported by the eCIC online tool (eCiC = electronic Collaborative idea Cultivation). Together the method and tool constitute the eCIC system. The eCiC interaction method is a procedure which defines a creative collaboration session in three stages: 1) the setting up of a creative collaboration session, 2) ideas processing according to the "Stockalper model" as well as applying the Solution Finder Model (SFM) and 3) closing the creative collaboration session. Stage 2 contains the use of two relevant models, the "Stockalper Model" which guides the user through three different questions, symbolised by the moon (illuminate your way in the darkness), stars (search for new ideas) and sun (deploy your solution) as well as the Solution Finder Model, a problem-solving method which is based on the principle that in order to find a high quality solution, the 3 elements of need, objective and solution should always be identified and explicitly connected to build a coherent triad (the unity). This paper describes the eCiC approach, the method and models, the online tool as well as some applications in educational situations. As the eCiC system has already been used in distributed research teams, worldwide business companies and distant driven educational courses, a summary of experiences, possible applications and future developments will be made.

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The aim of our chapter is to contribute to a better understanding of E-Collaboration, especially its intimate connection with knowledge and knowledge processes. We begin by presenting a knowledge-oriented understanding of E-Collaboration and an architecture of an E-Collaboration system (people, processes and technology) based on that understanding; then we describe the eSF system (an implementation of this architecture within our team), our experiences with it and what we have learned about the success factors of E-Collaboration.