Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 4, 1993

Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting

Processes for Collaborative Advantage
A Gentle Exploration of Tensions

This paper discusses some of the issues involved in the design of processes for effective collaboration between organisations. It considers, firstly, the relevance of, and barriers to, formal processes and argues for an incremental learning process as a way of moving organisations towards acceptance of these. Secondly, it introduces the notion of a balance of tensions in factors affecting the success of collaboration. Finally, it argues that formal processes which involve participants in an exploration of the factors relevant to their own collaborative context, are more likely to lead to achievement of collaborative advantage than those based on prescriptive guidelines.