Antecedents to effective collaboration to innovate

Today organizations are facing a new challenge in their competitive environment. This new challenge is the high-speed changes and advances in technology and innovation, which requires that organizations become responsive and flexible. They must focus on quickly adapting and developing new capabilities to keep pace with this change. The recognition of collaboration as a type of interorganizational relationship is on the rise. Collaboration, therefore, has emerged as an influential strategy to advance innovation in organizations and is taking center stage as the research and development (R&D) requirements of companies rises. The increase is significant in industries where R&D is characterized by high risk and uncertainties. Organizations will seek to collaborate on R&D projects because collaboration is more flexible and less binding than relations such as alliances and joint ventures. Although researchers, practitioners, and governments realize the importance of collaboration and the practice of interorganizational collaboration is growing, many of these collaborative activities fail. According to Fortune 1999, 30-70% of relationships formed were considered failures by either of the partners or they were discontinued before reaching the desired goals. These two factors are the starting point of the research presented in this dissertation. As the importance of collaboration is on the rise, more companies will opt to collaborate. However, most of these efforts fail during implementation; therefore, resources are wasted and goals are not achieved.

This research addresses the failure in implementing collaboration by developing a model for antecedents that are needed to render the process effective. In the research, elements of past relations between organizations and their partners were used to develop a model for effective collaboration. The length and strength of these past relations have been argued as two antecedents related to effective collaboration. The third antecedent is the knowledge an organization acquires as it monitors its relationships in general. This is referred to by this paper as a 'relationship' infrastructure. The model developed links between the antecedents to the posited effective collaboration process and the objective outcome of innovation. That model was then empirically tested, using surveys sent to major companies representing the oil, communications, and pharmaceutical industries in Canada.

Questionnaires were sent to a total of 521 companies in the three industries. Of these questionnaires, 46 were received. Results showed that all three antecedents influence the effective collaboration process. In addition, findings demonstrated that predicting the partner's behavior and allocating resources to the support of the collaborative process are the most important of the elements of effective collaboration and will influence the objective outcome of innovation.