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.