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Companies
that excel in using partnerships to innovate are known for
doing many things well. For example, they figure out how
collaboration can improve the top line as well as the
bottom line and they organize themselves to work
effectively with partners. What isn’t widely appreciated
is how much time and effort these companies put into
getting better at collaborating.
Unlike the many companies that treat
collaboration as a form of outsourcing, leading firms make
significant investments to develop their collaborative
capabilities—for instance, by experimenting to learn what
processes and practices work best or by selecting a new
partner in order to tap its broader experience of
cooperating with others. These firms don’t assume that
their existing staff and processes are equipped to work
with creative partners around the globe. In fact, they
believe the opposite—that they must discover new skills
and organizational arrangements to make collaboration
work.
Our worldwide study of collaborative
innovation reveals that this willingness to invest in
improving partnering capabilities is one of the factors
that help successful companies develop collaboration as a
new and important source of competitive advantage. The
study, encompassing a range of industries, from aerospace
to software, included interviews with more than 100
managers in 20 firms that use collaboration extensively in
their innovation efforts.
Our work revealed that leading firms make
strategic investments in collaboration, drawing funds from
outside the budgets of individual projects. These
investments address four crucial areas:
PEOPLE
Successful
firms alter their recruitment, training, evaluation and
reward systems to focus on “soft” skills such as
communication so that managers can better learn to
motivate and coordinate team members who are outside the
firm and, sometimes, in vastly different cultures. Many of
these companies also help to train partners—for example,
by inviting them to internal development programs so that
future teams learn together what it takes to collaborate.
PROCESSES
Leading
firms use a learning-driven approach to designing
collaborative processes. German electronics giant Siemens
recruited several university teams around the globe to
test different strategies for managing distributed teams.
Among the lessons learned: Teams from different cultures
have different strengths and working methods, which must
be matched to their assigned tasks; and formal
requirements are no substitute for frequent,
high-bandwidth communications, which are critical for
resolving unanticipated problems.
PLATFORMS
It’s
important to create an infrastructure—a set of tools and
standards for sharing data—that allows dispersed teams to
work together seamlessly. Failure to do so puts a project
at risk. In 2006 Airbus revealed that its flagship A380
aircraft would be delayed two years, at a cost of billions
of dollars, because partners’ use of different versions of
design software resulted in 300 miles of wiring and 40,000
connectors that did not fit together.
PROGRAM
Successful
firms manage collaboration as a coherent program, not a
series of stand-alone efforts. Many companies achieve this
by, in effect, designating a “chief collaboration
officer,” who oversees all partnered efforts and focuses
on building the firm’s overall collaborative capabilities.
Boeing’s development of the 787 Dreamliner,
scheduled for introduction later this year, highlights
what can be achieved by addressing all four crucial areas.
The incredibly complex project includes 50-plus partners
from more than 130 locations that have worked together for
more than four years. From the start, Boeing’s aim was to
leverage advanced capabilities from this network, not
replicate partners’ skills. For example, rather than
trying to become the primary expert in the new composite
materials that were being deployed, Boeing tapped the
expertise of smaller firms that already possessed
leading-edge capabilities in those materials.
Our observations suggest that Boeing’s
source of competitive advantage is shifting. While the
firm possesses technical skills in hundreds of diverse
disciplines, those skills no longer differentiate it from
competitors. Instead, the company’s success is
increasingly tied to its ability to orchestrate and
integrate the efforts of hundreds of global partners.
Boeing is learning how to collaborate.
Alan
MacCormack is an associate professor in the technology and
operations management unit at
Harvard
Business School in Boston. Theodore Forbath is the chief
strategist and practice leader for the global product
strategy and architecture practice at Wipro Technologies.
He is based in Boston. |
