Shared Mind-set

"Mutual creativity is a shared mind-set. As you get better at it, problems take on a different tone. By learning to be creative together, you increase the chances of constructively sorting through your differences, which encourages you to go further. The earlier you adopt this style, the sooner it will start working for you."¹

Joint Creativity in Strategic Alliances

In an opportunity-maximizing strategic alliance, continued joint creativity leads to regular improvement, outperforming what any single change can do. Trust-based relationships and complementary assets must exist between partners for this approach to be used successfully. In this informal approach, monitoring costs are reduced and opportunities to create value through cooperative relationship are maximized because alliance partners can pursue potential rent-generating opportunities that aren't available to partners in more contractually restricted alliances.

 Case in Point   Joint Engineering Design by Ford and ABB

Intent on doing their firm's combined best through achieving synergy, Ford and ABB assembled a joint engineering team and charged members with blending their know-how to find an optimal solution to their cost, cycle time, safety, and other objectives. ABB people shared their knowledge about technologies and processes, while Ford team members contributed their experience with paint plants. The joint team produced a design markedly different from anything from anything that had been done before. It had a smaller footprint, a multistory rather than a one-story structure, a revised system layout, and a far cleaner internal environment – which made a big quality difference in finished cars.

 Case in Point   AT&T

AT&T entered in a strategic alliance with a much smaller credit card technology firm to develop a new credit card service. To ensure secrecy – to stay beneath the radar of their main competitors – so that the alliance could maintain a critical lead in the industry, companies established trust-based relationships and no contracts was used for the first several months of this relationship. During this same time, the firms worked collaboratively, sharing information and resources while relying on the character and goodwill of each other to guide the relationship. In examining this relationship, AT&T was more concerned with maximizing the opportunities of the alliance than with minimization of potential opportunism within it.

 Case in Point  Nypro

Nypro Inc., the eighth-largest plastics injection molder in the United States, is a global contract manufacturer. The company transformed itself from an undistinguished also-run to an internationally heralded leader in zero-defect production.³ Nypro searched out sophisticated customers, initially targeting cutting-edge manufacturers of health-care products whose needs for product safety demanded far higher specifications than any existing injection process could deliver. Nypro designed new injection process for each customer, sharing insights with the customers' own engineering and marketing teams to solve their specific problems. They worked together: partners in innovation. Nypro situated its new plants next door to its customers and integrated its new process with theirs. As a result, Nypro's customers got more sophisticated products produced at lower costs with a faster cycle time and fewer defects... More

Free Micro-course 10 slides

New Product Development

 

References:

1. "Trusted Partners", Jordan D. Lewis

2. "Creativity", Alexander Hiam

3. "Customer Intimacy", Fred Wiersema

4. SMART Innovation, Vadim Kotelnikov

5. New Product – Fast!, Vadim Kotelnikov

6. The Jazz of Innovation, Vadim Kotelnikov

7. Managing Radical Innovation, Vadim Kotelnikov