Collaboration is the New Competition.

The major reason for businesses’ existence is profitability.

As much as every business wants to do better than their competitors, there is a more pressing need for profitability, than outrunning your competitors. Business is not a race.

To maintain profitability, some businesses will have to merge ideas or plans and the execution with other businesses.

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” — Henry Ford

The coming together of more than one business can create a really great difference for the parties involved.

Businesses should collaborate to create joint value which is usually greater than what one business would.

Like the saying goes, two good heads are better than one.

When there is collaboration, better solutions to problems are gotten, as well as fresh ideas on how to do things.

There are times when competition is important though, but knowing when to collaborate is very important, both within and outside the organization.

Here are a couple of reasons collaboration is usually better than competition.

When you collaborate with another business, you open up more ways to serve the customers better. Collaboration brings about two or more people coming together to achieve a common goal. Most times, there are things a particular business does better than the other and coming together helps each of them to bring on their A game, based on their area of specialization.

Collaboration also helps a business to grow in profitability. This goes without saying though.

Since the business is now serving the customers better, there will be more prospects of growth and increased revenue for the business.

Creativity is also improved when there is collaboration. People get more ideas from the ideas of others and it just leads to a whole new line of creative thinking.

Businesses who have come together to create a more valuable product or customer experience for their customers have profited better than if they had decided to compete with each other.

I’d conclude with this quote by Ken Blanchard, “None of us is as smart as all of us.”