The final vital ingredient of a successful collaboration is stamina. It may take time and effort to overcome the initial hurdles and make a new collaboration work. Both parties need to recognize this and build an appropriately long-term perspective into their goals and expectations for the collaboration. This means including metrics that review performance beyond the first year, as well as conducting some joint, long-term planning so both partners can gain an understanding of each other's longer-term objectives and identify a roadmap of initiatives they can work on together over time. Such planning helps companies to break out of the short-term-project mentality that can limit the beneficial impact of collaborative efforts. Nevertheless, partners must also take care to ensure that they are doing everything they can to capture any available quick wins, so the collaboration starts delivering value as rapidly as possible.
When companies take a long-term perspective, their collaborative efforts can become a virtuous circle: a greater understanding of each other's capabilities, knowledge, and costs will often reveal new potential sources of value, while the experience of working closely together means that later initiatives will take less time and be easier to execute than early ones.