Article | Harvard Business Review | January 2008

Learning the Fine Art of Collaboration

by Alan MacCormack and Theodore Forbath

Abstract

Innovations are increasingly brought to the market by networks of firms, selected for their unique capabilities and operating in a coordinated manner. This collaborative model demands that firms develop different skills, yet despite this need, there is little guidance on how to develop these abilities. Based on a recent study, this article describes the main factor differentiating those firms who excel at collaboration from those who struggle – the ability to learn how to collaborate. We describe the four areas in which firms must invest to get better at learning: People, Process, Platforms and Programs.

Keywords: Supply Chain Management; Learning; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Social and Collaborative Networks; Networks; Programs; Management Skills; Management Practices and Processes; Technology Platform; Market Platforms; Business Processes; Business Model;

Format: Print

2 pages

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Citation:

MacCormack, Alan, and Theodore Forbath. "Learning the Fine Art of Collaboration." Special Issue on HBS Centennial. Harvard Business Review 86, no. 1 (January 2008): 10–11.

In this paper, we describe an operational methodology for characterising the architecture of technical systems and demonstrate its application to a large sample of software releases. Our methodology is based upon network graphs, and allows us to identify define three fundamental architectural patterns, which we call core-periphery, multi-core, and hierarchical. We apply our methodology to a sample of 1,286 software releases from 17 applications, and find that 70 – 80% of these systems possess a "core-periphery" architecture under our classification scheme. This type of architecture is characterized by having a single dominant cyclic group (the Core) that is large relative to other cyclic groups and above a threshold with respect to system size. We find that the size of the Core varies widely, even for systems that perform the same function. These differences appear to be associated with different models of development—open, distributed organizations tend to develop systems with smaller Cores, while closed collocated organizations tend to develop systems with larger Cores. Our findings represent a first step in establishing some "stylized facts" about the fine-grained structure of large, real-world technical systems.

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