Large companies are often unfamiliar with cross-organizational collaboration as a way to work for decarbonization. Companies still rarely team up with suppliers or customers to co-innovate. Such collaboration can nevertheless resolve challenges that individual organizations are unable to overcome on their own.
Inter-organizational collaboration can help companies share knowledge, fast-track their product development and innovation activity, lower the costs and risks of business development as well as find synergies with each other. However, such collaboration must be based on mutual value definition, communication and trust. Collaborative networks are rarely self-coordinating and require some third-party organization.
Combient Pure has identified six key factors for successful value chain-wide collaboration projects:
Setting a mutual goal between the participating companies - sharing information and brainstorming to enable mutual sense-making of what should be done together and why, as well as ensuring that the goal is on similar priority level in the companies
Ensuring leadership support for the collaboration - this ensures correct goal-setting - nevertheless, the project team should consists of experts in the subject matter to achievetangible results
Ensuring that business value is created to all participating companies with the help of a neutral orchestrator - planning and leading the project in a way that meets all participating companies' needs
Establishing a trustful collaboration environment between participating companies - facilitating active engagement between the companies through regular meetings and workshops
Utilizing available data and subject matter experts to reach impactful results - supporting the work by gathering and synthesizing information, arranging expert interviews and inviting guest speakers as well as actively engaging all relevant parts of the organizations involved
Emphasis on both external and internal communications - the learnings and results of a collaboration project should not remain within the closed project team, but disseminated as widely as possible to enable impact
In the face of global megatrends and the need to decarbonize all sectors of the society, multi-company collaboration can accelerate the sustainable business transition of complete industries.
Combient Pure helps companies in the Combient Network and in their value chains to fast-forward decarbonization - with the help of multi-company collaboration. Get in touch with us in case you would like to learn more!