Question

Benefits of Collaboration Systems:

Discuss the major types of collaboration systems and how businesses can benefit from these systems.

Answer 1

Without a doubt, organizations are much more likely to achieve better results when their staff works effectively as a team. This is because good teamwork brings about synergy- where the interaction or cooperation of two or more individuals produces a combined effect that is significantly greater than the sum of their separate effects. In general term, this is known as Collaboration.

Definition of Collaboration

Collaboration is basically a purposeful relationship in which involved parties strategically decide to cooperate with the aim to achieve shared or overlapping objectives.

Teams that work collaboratively are more likely to obtain greater resources, recognition, and reward especially when facing competition for limited resources.

Types of Collaboration- Explained in Detail

Traditional models of collaboration focused more on the teams and formal, structured collaboration. Now that we are in the 21st century, more advanced and highly effective options have come up.

In this article, we have discussed in detail four types of collaboration and how an organization can approach them to reach set objectives.

1. Team Collaboration

In an organization, teams are expected to produce results, but good performance is often hindered when then the team members fail to cooperate. A collaborative team environment is therefore essential for the team's success.

In order to improve team collaboration, team members must fulfill their interdependent tasks within the given time by;

• Having a common purpose and goal
• Build trust amongst themselves
• Clarify roles
• Communicate openly and effectively
• Balance the team’s focus
• Appreciate diversity

A good example is a 10-member team working together to come up with a new marketing strategy with a properly defined set of resources in a period of 3 weeks.

2. Video Collaboration

In video collaboration, business organizations are able to save costs associated with staff travels.

Geographic dispersed participants are able to connect to a live meeting environment without having to travel all the way to the meeting location. This is made possible through video conferencing, a two-way interactive communication that is basically similar to a telephone call, but over video.

With video collaboration, your organization saves significant amounts of money with lower travel costs. It also helps accelerate decision making and significantly reduces marketing time by gathering all stakeholders for productive discussions.

Video collaboration can also help you enable and engage your growing remote workforce by seeing them much more frequently.

ezTalks Meetings is a good example of effective collaboration solutions. With ezTalks Meetings, you can get every single feature your staff needs to effectively conduct business meetings and conversations remotely.

With ezTalks Meetings, you can greatly increase business productivity with rich video collaboration features.

3. Network Collaboration

Network collaboration involves the interaction between organizations and people who are geographically distributed, largely autonomous, and heterogeneous in terms of their operating environment driven by goals, culture, and social capital, but all collaborate effectively to achieve common goals.

Often, the members do not know all other members, but their interactions are largely supported by computer networks.

Network collaboration is mainly driven by social media, universal internet connectivity, as well as the ability to connect with diverse people across distance and time. Also, in this type of collaboration, membership and timelines are open and limitless.

4. Cloud Collaboration

Advanced technology has made cloud collaboration a fast growing solution for issues related to data storage and collaboration in organizations.

By greatly enhancing data storage and sharing, organization staff are able to connect and work collectively as a team- and in a much more efficient and productive manner. Cloud collaboration basically enables two or more members to work on a project at once. The staff uses a cloud-based collaboration platform that allows them to share, edit, and work together on projects.

Other benefits of cloud collaboration include;

• Improved access to larger files
• Higher participation levels
• Better brainstorming
• Real-time updates
• Improved performance of organization
• Community collaboration

In community collaboration, the goal is usually focused on learning, rather than completing projects.

The members of an organization work on sharing and building knowledge. They may go into their immediate communities to help solve their problems while still learning, and then go back and implement their findings in their organizations.

In this type of collaboration, membership may be bounded and straightforward. However, the time period for these activities is often open or continuous. A good example of community collaboration is when members of a team requests for past project samples from their community to refer to in a new project.

This type of collaboration has the ability to give rise to properly defined team collaborations whereas the members get to know each other more, they can choose good fits based on talents and expertise in their areas of specialization.

5.Business colaboration

ccording to strategic management scholars, companies have spent the last half-century in a transition. This journey has taken them from closely managing to apparently not managing their strategic relationships. Not in the classical sense at least.

Pressured by increasing competition, shorter product lifecycles and increased risk, companies today see the advantages of connecting to a variety of collaborators and collaborator types. In other words, the logic of collaboration is shifting. With it, firms’ outlook, protection mechanisms, and mission are shifting too. The result? Long-term focus, less IP, and more joint strategizing. Above all, the activity of an organization is no longer about individual wellbeing. Today, there is more and more talk about ensuring the survival of the whole.

In as follows is a brief description of the four main types of collaboration known to us today (Alliances, Portfolios, Innovation Networks, and Ecosystems), and the importance of each.

i. Alliances

The most basic and longstanding type of collaboration for innovation is the strategic alliance. Strategic alliances are agreements between two (dyads) or more (triads, for example) independent firms, which temporarily combine resources and efforts to reach their strategic goals.

Alliances made headlines in the 1970s and 1980s as multinationals in IT (IBM, Microsoft, Apple), semiconductors (Intel) and biotechnology (Roche, Genentech, Eli Lilly) were experiencing the limitations of their own internal resources. As a result, they began tapping into externally available assets to increase competitiveness and reach evercomplex goals.

The main reasons to engage in a strategic alliance, and through this ensure continuous innovation, included:

• To compensate for in-house weaknesses or technological gaps,
• To establish new product lines and portfolios,
• To successfully enter new markets,
• To serve customers better,
• And to reduce NPD (New Product Development) costs, risks, and time.

In the strategic alliance era, collaboration meant creating formal, all encompassing, legal arrangements that allowed firms to cast a strong influence on their partners. Technology swapping, joint projects, and equity stakes were all used to have a greater say in a partners’ innovation projects. And to cash in on the profits, of course.

While formal control was largely the norm, the advantages of collaboration and looser coordination began to show. In other words, collaboration moved forward.

ii. Portfolios

The second type of collaborative arrangement, still often used today, is the portfolio.

Having understood the benefits of creating alliances, firms were now interested in sustaining their benefits for longer. As such, alliances began to be centrally managed and the practice of building portfolios gained ground.

In effect, portfolio management was all about extracting best practices from alliance experiences and then spreading these internally. In this process a so-called ego firm (or focal firm) established agreements with independent companies but then managed the knowledge flows through specific functions.

Traditionally, large pharmaceutical companies have been excellent portfolio builders. In the industry’s beginnings, these firms would often collaborate with small biotechnological firms to assimilate knowledge and patents in the most efficient and effective manner. While conflicts were frequent at the start – small biotechs often felt ‘robbed’ of their key resources – collaboration moved on. Effective portfolio management models were the key to this success.

All in all, the growing popularity of portfolio management translated into a new attitude towards collaborators. This attitude would later become the “co-creation” view, which we will come to in a bit.

iii.Innovation Networks

The third type of collaboration for innovation is the network. Networks include groups of firms that share R&D goals related to products, services, processes or business models. Some examples include CITER – the Centre for Textile Information in Emilia Romagna, Italy founded in 1980, KLM and Northwest Airlines (now Delta) initiated in 1989, and The Human Genome Project, an initiative that made waves in 1990 with its first published study/article.

Dense network structures are natural progressions of alliances and portfolios. As collaboration tools and practices spread from high-tech to medium and low-tech sectors, new ways of structuring the innovation activity emerged. The key difference: all firms were now interconnected, orchestration became less strict, and low-medium competition replaced the fierce battles for survival.

In time, networks started competing against each other, whereas suppliers, complementors, competitors, and even the customer could now contribute to the innovation process in new and surprising ways. Also, firms were no longer concerned with managing individual collaborations and ties. They were now managing their position in the network.

Despite higher coordination costs, the utility of networks soon became apparent. Networks were mainly used to:

• Scan firms’ environments for technological advances,
• Develop individual and group capabilities,
• And secure long-term survival.

All in all, networks emphasized even more the collective wellbeing of the collaborators.

iv. Ecosystems

The fourth and most advanced type of collaboration for innovation is the ecosystem.

In their 2016 HBR piece called “The Ecosystem of Co-created Value”, authors Marc Kramer and Mark Pfitzer, make a strong case for ecosystems. From their work we learn not only how ubiquitous ecosystems have become but also begin to understand their power to improve individual and collective wellbeing.

Today, companies like Salesforce – client relationship management systems, IMEC – Nano electronics, Korean Air – air travel, and ENEL – electricity and gas distribution are just a few examples of how ecosystems can and should be used to create value which no single organization can create on its own.

While a generally accepted definition of ecosystems is lacking, scholars like Ron Adner have underlined a few key characteristics. In his view, ecosystems have long-term orientation, are partly self-adjusting and make complex interdependencies between various types of partners, including end customers, explicit.

Other prominent researchers such as Satish Nambisan and Robert Baron add more nuance to ecosystems and show how ecosystem partners co-evolve. In their view ecosystems are “loosely interconnected networks of companies and other entities that coevolve capabilities around a shared set of technologies, knowledge, or skills, and work cooperatively and competitively to develop new products and services”.

The most comprehensive description of ecosystems, however, is captured by marketing experts. In their work, researchers Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch define ecosystems as: “relatively self-contained, self-adjusting systems of resource-integrating actors connected by shared institutional arrangements and mutual value creation through service exchange”.

The latter view is extremely important for two reasons:

• First, ecosystems are governed by certain rules and norms that influence the relationships between members.
• Second, in ecosystems value is uniquely determined by the collaborator(s) or customer(s). Hence, innovation is no longer in service of the focal firm. Innovation is now a jointly orchestrated activity.

All in all, ecosystems are typically characterized by:

• The absence of a formal authority,
• Strong dependencies among members,
• A common set of goals and objectives, and
• A shared set of (complementary) knowledge and skills.

Shared vision, shared enterprise, serving each other, helping each other create value, committing to each other, and pursuing jointly formulated strategies and goals hence becomes the norm.

To conclude, effective collaboration can take many forms. From the first strategic alliances in IT and pharma to modern-day ecosystems in transportation, retailing, and utilities, companies and their collaborators are coming together to solve problems no single one of them could address alone. Self-stirring pots, smart thermostats and 3-D printed bridges are all the product of ambitious collaboration.

Conclusion

Collaboration plays a crucial role in the success of an organization since set objectives are achieved rapidly and with finite resources. Often, collaboration requires leadership, although in most cases, the form of leadership can be social within either a decentralized or egalitarian group.

All the same, organization teams that choose to work collaboratively have a greater chance of achieving set objectives, obtaining greater resources, and obtain recognition and reward when dealing with stiff competition for limited resources.

Businesses can be benefited from these systems in following aspects:

Sharing information with internal and external colleagues is becoming a standard in today’s way of working. With the rise of cloud collaboration and collaborative technologies such as Office 365 and SharePoint, people, systems, devices, processes and assets across organizations are more easily connected than ever.

But while internal collaboration is a natural development of the traditional teamwork applied to modern workplaces, external collaboration might seem a disruptive need. It’s a “friend or foe” question for many business leaders: The speed of these changes might seem overwhelming or risky but it also represents a great opportunity to be more competitive and do things quickly and efficiently.

Here is the explaination of 7 key benefits of extending collaboration to partners, clients and other stakeholders, so that you can answer the question for yourself:

1 - CUT COSTS

It goes without saying, one of the most interesting advantages of b2b collaboration tools is to leverage resources and help companies to minimize expenses. Slashing travel and generic operational costs is one of the most immediate benefits of being able to connect and share information easily across distance barriers. Also, as the network of available resources and talent grows, productivity increases and the product development and marketing costs tend to reduce.

2 - ATTRACT AND RETAIN TALENT

Employees value flexible workplaces that encourage the sharing and development of skills and teamwork. Remote workers also demand the right tools to leverage communication and specialty knowledge not only within the company, but also across their entire business network. Satisfied and motivated employees are the best company’s advocates and help in attracting more top talent.

3 - STREAMLINE PROCESSES

Secure information sharing makes business intelligence flow faster, leading to better decision-making and reducing the decision-cycle times. Collaborated knowledge and expertise within internal and external teams also stimulates a quick adaption to changing business environments.

4 - DRIVE INNOVATION

With easier access to additional know-how and resources, your company will have the foundation to develop innovative products, processes or services. Collaborative research is naturally fostered and developed faster and cost-effectively.

5 - INCREASE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Co-operative intelligence in all business departments, especially information on marketing, costing or product design will increase your competitive advantage by imbuing complementary strengths, capabilities and also best practices in your offering.

Enhanced collaboration enables companies who complement each other to submit joint tenders and compete in markets usually beyond their individual reach, be it through geographic, scale or expertise.

6 - EXPAND MARKET SHARE

Stronger relationships with stakeholders increase your company’s knowledge of the marketplace. This strengthens your ability to identify new potential customers, deliver differentiated products or services, suit different consumer segments, improve customer service and consequently compete more effectively.

7 - MAXIMIZE RESULTS

All of the above will contribute to increase your teams’ productivity, win larger contracts and ultimately to increase revenue and maximize your investments.

Enterprise collaboration is one of the three core areas where you can capitalize on digital opportunities to excel business results. Learn more on how to build personalized experiences and reinforce your engagement with different stakeholders: employees, partners and suppliers.