Collaborative building blocks

When talking to customers, partners or just interested people, the topic of collaboration is always an interesting one and a pretty contentious one at that. They are interesting discussions because everybody wants to improve their collaborative efforts and they are contentious because everybody has their own idea on how to approach improving these efforts.

What all seem to agree on is to look for complementary skills in the other party. Be it an individual or a company. E.g. one has an interesting product and the other the means to enter an interested segment of the market. Another subject most can agree on is to look for efficiency opportunities in working together. E.g. outsourcing of administrative or IT tasks. As a consequence of the previous two most agree on the fact that these kinds of collaborative efforts are transaction based; tit for tat. This is a very successful strategy, but also one that is very easy to copy.

I like to look at things from a different perspective. All of the above see the building blocks of collaboration in portions of individuals or companies. In other words, the individual or company is an indivisible building block, not a configuration of micro building blocks itself. This creates the premise for the aforementioned transaction based and sequentially structured value chain for collaboration. A way around this is for two or more companies to start a new one, with all the growing pains that are involved. I on the other hand want to look at the micro building blocks of the individual or company and use these not only to create value in their own chain, but add to this the option of integrating, combining and recombining parts of the individual’s and company’s micro building blocks into something new; the possibility to enter new value chains and create opportunities that neither can do alone or together as they are now. This approach also results in a new block to build with in the original value chain without having to go through setting up a completely new entity. Two flies in one stroke!

It is more than an interesting train of thought because our global village is forcing us to adapt to ever changing circumstances and alliances faster and faster. Companies and individuals can not get away with defining themselves as fixed macro building blocks, this is just not flexible enough anymore for our times. Even in partnerships, efficiency gains are not enough to compete against the far lower wages in the East. Their technology ‘disadvantage’ is slinking fast, so in five to ten years only wage will matter and they will still not be anywhere near western wages. We in the West will only be able to compete by changing the playing field. What better way to do so, then by integrating the context dependent best micro building blocks for a situation when they are needed. The Chinese, Koreans and Indians are building on such a large scale, that this will be a very hard act to follow! To change the playing field, we need to look beyond the exterior ‘brand’ of individuals and companies and create new collaborative efforts and ‘brands’ based on integrating the best building blocks suited to a new or changing context.

There is no such thing as coincidence. The pieces of the puzzle are finally starting to fit on more than a scientific level. Not only do we have the means to measure the strengths of minor building blocks and create insight, but we also have the means to aggregate this insight on a macro level and create new building blocks ready to tackle change and direct innovation.