Three shades of collaboration

“Collaboration’s a catchphrase,” says Wellington entrepreneur Serge van Dam.

“I hate the word personally because it’s illdefined and not meaningful.”

Idealog would pretty much agree. With modern parlance, it’s sometimes hard to separate the sharing economy from the collaborative economy; crowdsourcing from being paid to lend your car to the guy down the road (surely not collaboration, but just another form of one-on-one transaction).

We asked van Dam to break it down more. He says there are three types of meaningful collaboration: vertical, horizontal and geographic.

Vertical: Collaboration between companies in the same industry selling to the same parties – often called ‘ clustering’. Companies share resources, information and contacts for their mutual benefit. This can be particularly useful when one company can leverage its good reputation to the mutual advantage of other companies.

Horizontal: Collaboration between companies with similar functions that don’t necessarily sell to the same people. Horizontal collaboration is more about sharing skills rather than contacts.

“There’s a lot we can learn from each other, so the benefit is in intellectual property, not in escalating sales,” van Dam says. “We don’t help any individual sell more, we just help everyone be better at their jobs.”

Geographic: Collaboration between companies in the same territories, even if they are participating in different markets. Geographical collaboration is “one of the best things you can do for moral support and logistical support, helping people establish themselves in a market and giving them cultural guidance. It helps but it doesn’t necessarily move the needle.”