Collaborate with Your Competitors

Collaborate with Your Competitors - An article summary per Hamels, Doz, and Prahalad

Written for Thunderbird School of Global Management - Spring 2012

Summary

This article describes several major tenants regarding the nature of Competitive Collaboration as well as patterns of behaviors, motivations, and goals of alliances made between Western and Asian competitors.  While analyzing over a dozen collaborations Hamels, Doz, and Prahalad explain that they were out to determine the ways in which companies gained from the collaboration (“shift of competitive strength”) – a measure of success.  Quickly they identify that longevity of the alliance is not believed to be a reliable success measure.  Instead they focused on how competitors used collaboration to increase their “internal skills” and technology while they guard against over-transferring of information.

The best collaborators adhere to four principles to remain successful: collaboration is certainly still competition and there will likely be a winner and a loser, harmony in the collaboration is not very important, defend against competitive compromise with disciplined employees, and learning from your partner is among the most important themes.

Some general themes regarding behavior and motivation are portrayed.  For instance, when only one partner out of two is dedicated to learning, competitive compromise eventually will ensue because mutual gain is only possible for a period of time.  Furthermore, for collaboration to succeed, both sides must offer value but protect against giving the farm away.  Lastly, a discussion of competency transfer versus technology transfer marked that Asian companies, who are usually very competent and have incredible process values, are often hard to learn from because process values are “normally deeply-woven fabrics of employee training, systems…”  Western companies’ technology is usually more easily learned and adopted.

Concluding, the authors recommended that Western companies enhance their capacity and receptivity to learn.  Methods like competitive benchmarking and instituting internal information clearinghouses are terrific ways to learn and disseminate knowledge in an organization.

Extend

This article was well put together, however I felt that the opinions and findings lacked significant background information.  I’m certain that the research contains a great deal of case study supporting evidence that reached conclusions like: Asian companies value learning more than Western companies, that Western companies need to improve their receptiveness to learning, and Western companies’ traits (i.e. technology) are more easily adopted and learned than Asian companies’ traits.  These conclusions based on case studies, which are all rather cultural findings, lack compulsory research that would better support the conclusions.  I would recommend that the authors better support their findings by applying some of the following research to the cases they researched.

It would be helpful for the authors to conduct sociological or anthropological research to validate the three aforementioned conclusions to see if there is any supporting evidence as to why Asians might be more receptive and successful to learning during collaboration than Western counterparts.  It might be found that Asians are more humble, receptive, open, and eager than Westerns in general.  These sorts of traits might be justifying the case study findings.  It might be found for instance that North Americans and Europeans have become complacent and lazier than their ancestors from 200 years prior.

Fundamentally, extended research to better understand the personalities and culture of the two competing groups would better solidify the conclusions than a seemingly unproven method for determining who wins during competitive collaboration and why.