
Collaboration: The Secret Hack of Innovators
Updated: Dec 20, 2022
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
Consortium is typically a formalized agreement between two or more organizations or individuals to work together towards a common goal or to share resources. This type of collaboration is often used to pool resources and expertise to develop more advanced products, services, or technologies.
Federation
A federation is an agreement between two or more organizations or individuals to collaborate on a project or initiative, usually in order to achieve a specific purpose or goal. This type of collaboration is often used in the development of new technologies or products, as well as in research and educational initiatives. Once an idea has been tested or there is viability in a hypothesis, the teams need to formalize their agreement to develop this idea further to create an MVP ( Minimum Viable Product) or further develop their MVP, project, or initiative.