Question

All successful collaborations aim to achieve collaborative advantage. This, however, is not easily realised. Based on the course material, and using examples from your professional or personal life:

• Discuss the bases for achieving collaborative advantage;
• Discuss the types of goals that need to be set to achieve collaboration aims;
• Outline when these goals might lead to collaborative inertia and identify which might lead to harmful outcomes. (600 words)

Answer 1

The collaborative advantage is defined as the ability to form rewarding and effective partnerships with various organizations, for mutual benefit. In the businesses today, a well-developed ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations provides a significant competitive advantage.

There are three fundamental characteristics of productive partnerships:

i) They are living systems, that evolve progressively in their possibilities. Beyond the immediate benefits of the partnership, they offer the parties an option on the future, opening up new doors and unforeseen opportunities;

ii) They involve collaboration – the creation of new value together, rather than being a simple exchange, or transaction;

iii) They cannot be controlled by formal systems, but require a dense web of interpersonal connections.

Collaborations are conceptualized as paradoxical in nature with inherent contradictions and mutually exclusive elements caused by inevitable differences between partners; differences that contain the very potential for collaborative advantage.

The six bases for achieving collaborative advantage are as follows:-

1. Access to Resources: Organizations often collaborate if they are unable to achieve their objectives with their own resources. Sometimes this means pooling financial or human resources, but more often it allows to bring together different resources including technology or expertise. For example, Inter-Company collaboration over taking a product to the market. This could be in the form of one company providing the product and the other providing access to the market.

2. Shared Risk: Organizations collaborate because the consequences of failure on a project are too high for them to risk taking it on alone and hence they share the risk. For example, a collaboration between cost-intensive research and development organizations.

3. Efficiency: Governments have often seen private organizations as being more efficient than public ones, and so they have promoted public-private partnerships (collaboration). Efficiency stems from the notion of economies of scale, outsourcing activities, and efficient operational activities.

4. Coordination: It is the demonstration of arranging, influencing diverse individuals or things to cooperate for an objective or impact to satisfy wanted objectives in an association.

5. Learning: While coordinated efforts are set up to seek after some joint action, some are made with the point of shared learning.

6. Moral Imperative: Collaboration is fundamental to ease any issues at the association, business, society, and national levels.

The different types of goals that need to be set to achieve collaboration aims are mentioned below.

Goals that influence the actions and directions of collaboration differ in type over six dimensions: level, origin, authenticity, relevance, content, and overtness.

i) Level: The first dimension relates to the level at which goals are recognized. It distinguishes between those that are about the collaboration, those that are about organizational purposes, and those that individuals wish to achieve. Goals expressed at the collaboration level relate to participants’ views of what the collaborating partners aspire to achieve together. In contrast, organizational and individual level goals relate to the aspirations for the collaboration of each of the organizations and individuals involved.

ii) Origin: Goals formulated by members are sometimes strongly influenced by the goals of organizations or individuals external to the collaboration. Whether collaborations are mandated or constrained by government, nation-wide policies, as well as local priorities and interests, tend to have an effect on the goals of the collaboration.

iii) Authenticity: Goals expressed by members and external stakeholders may be genuine statements about what they aspire to achieve. However, there are many reasons why members may not identify with goals that are nevertheless publicly stated. For example, they may not subscribe to collaboration goals that have been imposed upon them by external pressure or changes in the situation may have altered the relevance of previously genuine goals.

iv) Relevance: The identification of specific goals for each of the parties involved as well as the joint purpose is acknowledged as important if the collaboration is to succeed. Recognizing which organizational goals can reasonably be pursued through the collaboration is, however, not always straightforward.

v) Content: Many of the goals expressed by individuals are essentially concerned with what the collaboration is about, such as gaining access to resources and expertise, sharing risk, increasing efficiency, improving co-ordination in service provision, and learning. They relate to substantive outcomes and are obviously important in all collaborations.

vi) Overtness: Finally, goals may be openly discussed and explicitly stated, but there are also many reasons why they may knowingly not be revealed to other participants, even if there is genuine goodwill between partners. Hidden agendas are endemic in collaboration. Deliberate concealing of goals is, however, not the only reason why they may not be clearly stated.

It is the interplay between these goals that generate a problematic part of the paradox by producing major obstacles to achieving a fully owned agreement of collaboration goals. The reasons can be as follows:

a) It is highly unlikely that all the goals will be in harmony.

b) It is highly unlikely that any individual participant will know or understand more than a portion of the goals that are at play. This is a function of the sheer size and complexity of the entanglement, distractions caused by pseudo and independent goals, and the masking effect of unstated or hidden goals.

c) Differing perceptions of goals can lead to a low degree of mutual understanding even where there is individual knowledge or understanding.

d) Because the entanglement is in a continuous state of flux as goals change over time, any mutual understanding of each others’ goals – and hence any agreement over a collaboration goal – tends to be short-lived.