Collaboration: The Secret Hack of Innovators

In every lifecycle of a product or service, we strive to tweak it where we highlight the potency of its effectiveness or efficiency. Whether you’re working on a new product, service, or process, what drives its sustainability is the opportunity to have passed thru many hands thru trial and error to create what it is or what it can be at its optimal level. This is how innovation is conceived.

Innovation is about more than coming up with new ideas – it’s about bringing those ideas to life, to test, and to necessity. And that takes collaboration. At the core of innovation, we tend to focus on improving a current process or solving a common problem in which a community has a common pain point. As the solution evolves it needs different perspectives and reactions to incubate and thrive. In some form, that requires an intricate level of collaboration (some intentional, but we'll talk about this later).

Collaboration can be classified as voluntary, consortia, federation, affiliation, and merger and can occur at five different levels: within disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, or national vs international (Reference).

Voluntary Collaboration

This form of collaboration is when organizations or individuals agree to work together on a project or initiative but have no formal contractual obligation to do so. This type of collaboration can occur between two or more parties based on mutual benefit or trust. This example most likely occurs in the early stage of an idea where two groups are testing this to make sure it works.

Consortia

Federation

Affiliation