Collaborative Advantage the Art of Alliances by Rosabeth Moss Kanter From the Julyã¢â“august 1994

Collaborative Advantage is the ability to form effective and rewarding partnerships with other organisations, for mutual benefit.

Being a good partner is a key corporate asset, or capability, for any business today.  In the individual sector, a well-developed ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations provides significant competitive advantage.  In the public sector, it tin can greatly enhance service outcomes and social value.

In her 1994 Harvard Business Review article "Collaborative Advantage", Rosabeth Moss Kanter outlined the central characteristics, forms and mechanisms of productive partnerships, based on a three year global inquiry project.

Kanter identified iii fundamental characteristics of productive partnerships:

• they are living systems, that evolve progressively in their possibilities. Beyond the immediate benefits of the partnership, they offer the parties an pick on the futurity, opening upwardly new doors and unforeseen opportunities;
• they involve collaboration – the creation of new value together, rather than existence a simple commutation, or transaction; and
• they cannot be controlled past formal systems, simply require a dense web of interpersonal connections.

Cooperative arrangements betwixt organisations exist along a continuum, from weak and distant, to strong and close.

At one farthermost, are mutual service consortia (as in Shared Services). Similar organisations pool their resource to gain a do good, e.thousand. through reduced costs, or to gain admission to accelerate technology.

At the mid-point are joint ventures .  This is where organisations pursue an opportunity that requires the combined capabilities of each, e.g. the technology of one and the market access of another.

The strongest and closest collaborations are value-concatenation partnerships .  This is where organisations in different sectors, but with complementary skills, link their capabilities to create additional value for their customers.

Organisations can participate simultaneously in many kinds of partnership, and partners in any human relationship can play a variety of roles.

Active collaboration takes place when organisations develop mechanisms – structures, processes and skills – to achieve the necessary level of integration.

Kanter establish that the almost productive relationships accomplish v levels of integration:

Strategic integration.  This involves continuous contact between the peak leaders of each organisation.  Leaders should non grade a partnership then leave it to others to nurture the relationship;

Tactical integration. this brings middle managers and professionals together to develop plans for specific projects or joint activities;

Operational integration. This is the sharing of resources, information and knowledge to achieve the planned joint projects and activities, e.g. through co-located teams, joint grooming programmes and data sharing;

Interpersonal integration. True collaboration will not occur unless a network of inter-personal ties develops between the members of each organisation.   Personal relationships are very much the gum that binds the partnership together; and

Cultural integration. This requires that those involved in the partnership have the necessary communication skills and cultural awareness, to span whatever differences in culture that be.

Kanter's research institute that some cultures are more skillful at collaboration than others.  She found that N American companies tend to have a "narrow, opportunistic view of relationships…barely tolerable alternatives to outright acquisition."  She plant Asian companies the well-nigh good, with European companies falling somewhere in between.

Many of the aforementioned principles outlined here, also apply to customer-supplier relationships.  Although non an alliance betwixt equal parties, significant reward can be gained by forming productive strategic partnerships across your supplier network.

Collaborative Advantage should not be confused with other forms of collaboration betwixt organisations, due east.g. concerned with the exchange of information and practices, i.e. networking, or the establishment of links in the service delivery chain, e.g. working confronting a common set of objectives.  This comes under the broader heading of collaborative working.

Partnership Canvass

A skillful structured approach to exploring and agreement your strategic partnerships is the Partnership Canvas, evolution by Bart Doorneweert.

The Partnership Canvas explores the 'value exchange' between existing or potentially new partners.

I will be exploring the apply of the Partnership Canvass at a later date under "Methods", merely for now you will find lots of information on Bart's web site.

Further Reading….

Information technology's fair to say that not about plenty has been written near collaborative advantage and strategic partnerships since Kanter's landmark article. This is quite surprising considering most organisations are not very good at them. And predatory moves are not unheard of.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter , "Collaborative Advantage: The Art of Alliances", 1994

You can read the original article by Rosabeth Moss Kanter here.  Read on-line if a subscriber of HBR, or buy, at depression toll, as a pdf.

Elizabeth Lank, "Collaborative Advantage: How Organisations Win past Working Together", 2006

If involved in collaborative ventures, then certainly worth a read.  Rather slow writing style.  Still waiting for that killer volume!

Jeffrey H. Dyer, "Collaborative Advantage: Winning through Extended Enterprise Supplier Networks", 2000

This is about the application of Collaborative Advantage to supplier networks, drawing on practices first developed at Toyota; and since adopted by companies such every bit DaimlerChrysler and others.  A useful general read equally well, particularly Chapter i.

David Frylinger, Oliver Hart and Kate Vitasek, A New Approach to Contracts, 2019

A fundamental difference between a partner and a supplier is the nature of the contract. Too oftentimes, partnerships are established using standard forms of procurement contract, which are entirely unsuitable and sow the seeds of failure earlier the partnership has even begun. This article sets out the fundamental differences and the course of contract that is required.

              Outset Published: 22/11/2012 Last Updated: 10/05/2020

cobbovered.blogspot.com

Source: https://design4services.com/concepts/collaborative-advantage/