Unleashing Potential Through Collaboration

Collaboration is a misunderstood concept, diluted from misuse and overuse of the word. As a result, organizations lose. They don’t benefit from potential innovations, process efficiencies, and solutions wasting time and resources on unsolved or poorly solved problems. Concept dilution prevents collaboration as a tool for innovation, risk reduction, and crossindustry pollination of ideas.

The flat interpretation of collaboration fails. Organizations have interdepartmental conversations and call it collaboration. Suppliers meet with their customers to “collaborate” about solutions.

Collaboration deserves escalation to the nth dimension. Collaboration requires formal structure and a cross-industry, cross-functional focus to produce robust results and sustainable solutions. It is only found at the intersection of end users, developers, and investors. Done well, collaboration inspires innovation, reduces risk, and solves cross-industry problems.

Successful leaders understand the importance of collaboration, yet don’t benefit from actually doing it. In research conducted by IBM, approximately 75 percent of CEOs say collaboration is very important to their innovation efforts, but only a little more than half say they practice collaboration to a large extent—leaving significant room for increased collaboration in the futurei. Even when collaboration is viewed as important, without tangible results organizations may opt out of providing the time and resources necessary to make it work.

Leaders recognize the importance of cross-industry, cross-organizational interaction. They may not translate these concepts into collaboration pro for industry due to the challenges associated with tactical implementation. A lack of knowledge, participants, framework and resources to engage in the deep collaboration required for maximum results may also present a barrier to recognizing the full value of collaboration. This is particularly true for the manufacturing industry and leads to issues identified in the sidebar to this page. When structured with the right participants and openness built on trust, collaboration goes beneath the surface to create game-changing opportunities to advance the industry or solve persistent issues, agnostic to sectors.

Collaboration Defined
To achieve a model of collaboration producing significant results, three pillars must be present at the outset. Deep collaboration not only involves partnership, it also implies a foundation of trust and the right people to impact change.

Misunderstood concepts occasionally benefit from antonym analysis – defining what something is not helps describe what it is. The volume of literature stretches from university research to TED talks; many of these demonstrate the deep misunderstanding regarding the concept..

Read More at
www.ncms.org/CollaborationReport