Collaborating with competitors

I was at all the SoDA unconference sessions at Roy's and they were definitely the highlight of my SxSWi experience. Some tempers were flaring and good thoughts being thrown around sometimes recklessly. All things that make for a great session! I'm with Rain, a SoDA agency (where was the love in the post?! You named almost every other SoDA group, but Rain?!? We'll be looking forward to that whole blog post just dedicated to our goodness :) I shared in the sessions a bit of a different take, which was that at Rain, we're not really looking to lead the overall client (at least not yet), we're looking to lead with the agencies on the technology front. We get many ideas and concepts given to us that quite frankly are garbage, or old news. Had we been involved in the idea creation phase, we could have lent our technical expertise and come up with a better digital concept. Several times in the sessions, there was the comparisons to the traditional agencies being the battleships, and the smaller digital agencies being the speed boats. We can turn on a dime, make quick and efficient changes, and adopt new practices or technologies much quicker. However, the speed boat doesn't have the massive fire power of the traditional agencies. I think where the conversation didn't go deep enough, and should have, was that the client NEEDS BOTH! There's tremendous value to have a big battleship on your side, but there's also tremendous value to have a speedy little boat to go places quickly. And in our agencies experience, we're seeing signs of some traditional agencies taking this approach, and others actually resisting it. Clearly the best outcomes are happening in the first scenario. I really hope the SxSW conversation continues, online and off.

Ed: I believe that we all want to go from the circle out. Hence the posts and article and the invitation for others to join. There are good discussions and bad. BDWCU seems like a great session. Can't wait to get there. I think that much of this is due to who instigates it. We're all interested in migrating the conversation to new places. Thanks for reading and sharing such a thoughtful reaction.

Let me take this idea of "competitive collaboration" and tip it on it's side and reframe the discussion. Is it more advantageous to us and people outside of the SoDA network to approach this more from an educational angle? I would have loved to have been at this meeting because I would be keenly interested in the perspective of those from Hyper Island. I attended a 2 day workshop at BDWCU in December ( and Edward I know you are doing one in April ) and I left that workshop thinking that it was First brilliant and Second sad that it's really only offered at one slightly remote place every few months. So why was BDWCU brilliant? Well it brought together a wide range of people and skill sets under the common umbrella of digital communication. Then it brought together a number of industry speakers to share their insights and create an open dialogue with not only the attendee's but also the other speakers. The workshop in itself became a collective knowledge share and working collaboration session. Theories were presented, challenged and explored between attendees and speakers. I met and worked with people from academia, broadcast news, product design, brand development and traditional marketing all with the goal of exploring what is possible with digital communication. But then this brings me to the second point. Why is this only happening here at BDWCU? With the wealth of talent scattered all about the globe programs like BDWCU could become critical hubs for this networked knowledge share - if only they can proliferate. I would think that education could be the perfect catalyst for SoDA to expand it's mission of helping us help ourselves. We get the collaboration of our peers by working and teaching with them, and we open ourselves to the possibilities of what we don't know by expanding our reach to those that are thirsty for knowledge. We also get the opportunity to experiment with format, distribution and even R&D. Through education we not only help ourselves and our agencies for the now but we also build the system that could drive major innovation in our future. To sum it all up maybe just looking at collaboration from within a tight circle is not as impactful as collaborating from the circle outwards. I could probably go on for pages here but I'm reminding myself again that this is just a comment box.

Edward, Call me old-fashioned, but think what's being proposed here would require a holding company structure, and that exists in the form of WPP, etc. And if these guys can't get it right, well, honestly, that;s not saying much, but still, what you propose in this piece is not that different from the dominant business structure we have today. The challenge, in my opinion, is that once you get a bunch of operating companies under one roof, you have to look at how each is performing. Obviously, this does not go unnoticed by the operating companies, so they start to compete and suddenly, the whole notion of a hive mind fails. As it should, honestly. I'm all for collaboration, but to the victors go the spoils and their are always victors, right or wrong. Jeff .-= Jeff Shattuck´s last blog ..If your wife is going to tell you your lyrics still don’t work… =-.

We met with the MXM guys a few weeks ago and they mentioned this disruptor meeting. Would have loved to have gotten across to Texas to get involved - but just too busy with the launch of Guided. That said it I would like to offer some views all the same. Obstacles for competitor collaboration are going to be quite complex to decipher for larger and more established setups. The smaller the organisations the more practical most probably. The utopian principle is great, but would everyone contribute equally? Might it not be better to pair with organisations which could loosely be considered competitors but that have substantial differences and the ability to share skills. i.e. The sum of the parts given the combined ability to punch above individual weight. We're teaming up with a bunch of similar but not outright competitors. One of the most interesting perhaps is Jotta.com - This gives us access to the best emerging talent coming from London arts universities. We can plug this is in to our offering as a much bigger resource than our own collective, but for relevant projects (say youth focused brands). There's also a coms planning group we're hooking up with. They offer us sturdy thinking and we offer them a very diverse creative resource. Collaboration is now possible in ways never previously possible and this is awesome but perhaps the most obvious potential is for smaller crews with new view points to combine free from the overbearing influence traditional networks. To create new modular networks with retention of individuality and choice of direction.