Business growth through collaboration

Collaboration is a powerful business tool for companies, regardless of their size or industry. It typically refers to organisations working together to address problems and achieve goals that seem to be out of reach when working alone.

By combining the effort and expertise of different organisations, all partners in the network are better able to innovate and grow, and increase their competitiveness on many levels.

Business collaboration benefits

Key benefits of business collaboration fall under several categories:

• financial benefits - collaboration can boost your domestic or export sales, enable you to tender for larger contracts or cut costs by sharing resources
• human capital - collaboration can increase your ability to develop employees' skills and capabilities, safeguard jobs, increase employment and encourage staff motivation
• physical capital - collaboration can enable you to share facilities, resources, equipment and raw materials
• intellectual capital - collaboration can allow you to tap into the combined expertise, knowledge and capabilities 

Collaborative competitiveness

Business networks may provide member companies with access to resources that would otherwise be beyond the scope of a single business. Individual businesses can face several limitations when trying to compete in global markets. This may include scale and expertise.

Through successful business collaboration, companies can often complement each other and specialise in different areas to compete in markets usually beyond their individual reach.

Collaboration vs competition

In collaborative working, communication and information sharing between partners are essential. However, this doesn't mean you have to give up all your business 'know-how'.

Collaboration can take many forms and you can build a network in a way that allows companies to complement each other without risking their market share or intellectual property. Read about the different types of business collaboration.