The best option is to collaborate or die…
Remember when people with innovative ideas would protect them from view despite the help they might have received from others? So many of those ideas, whilst brilliant in concept, were so poorly deployed that they never achieved anything more than a footnote in the annals of entrepreneurial history.
Fast forward to Tesla motor manufacturers who are seriously planning to give their technology away for free in order to kick-start the electric car industry. This would be considered business suicide only a few years ago but we have woken up to something very potent in our midst.
What that potent force is quite simple…. it is us!
Such is the power of collaboration that the ‘whole’ achieved is genuinely more than the sum of the parts.. There will be some staggering advances in technology with this concept not to mention some huge businesses rising from the combined kitchen tables from the suburbs and loft apartments around the globe. This may very well be a ‘golden age’ for business at a time when we have little trust in the institutions traditionally charged with nurturing our dreams. This revulsion of the financial system and its lack of oversight has spurned a grass-roots movement of combined brains and drive which will change the face of technology and business in much the same way The Beatles changed popular music for ever.
It is not just finances which needs a different collaborative paradigm but the creation and refining of ideas also. None of us work alone, even if we think we do. Social media is really a massive collaborative engine which we all dip in and out of when we need ideas and feedback. The possibilities are endless however we should be beware of one fact which is written in stone.
‘If you do not collaborate, your business will die’ hmmm, sobering thought but not really a surprise when you consider our brains are made to collaborate and socialise, so everything we do should cater for that human truth.
see you on the long and winding road….. Patrick
