Coming together is a beginning.

Keeping together is progress.

Working together is success.

Henry Ford, 1863 – 1947

Optimal cooperation and networking both within a company itself and with partners and customers are of key strategic significance in today’s business world (Page; Ehring, 2001, 1 et seqq.). Traditional regulatory mechanisms such as organization and processes provide a general framework for performance, but the “point of collaboration” is where the die is cast: Does this division of labor yield its benefits of efficiency or does it become paralyzed, petering out from a lack of orientation or the loss of energy from friction?

Alignment, the committed orientation of market players and their mobilization in the direction of a common objective, becomes the success factor in any situation where cooperation is especially critical. Business collaboration is the systematically designed collaboration, carried out professionally, of economic units within an organization – within a team, for instance, or, perhaps more importantly, among the business units of a company – or in sharing with company partners along the value chain with the goal of realizing a common business purpose, the so-called “joint business mission”, in the best possible way.

Business collaboration is frequently supported by new technological solutions, above all, this includes cross-location and fast-responding social interaction, offering full-area coverage as needed, utilizing modern IT and telecommunications technologies or the infrastructure of Web 2.0.

So business collaboration takes place at all different levels: among staff members within the framework of social networks or on the intranet as well as in the course of the electronic exchange of data during service performance and activities oriented to partners or customers such as the acquisition work done by selling teams acting all across Europe on the basis of a division of labor. Collaboration is not per se restricted to technological aspects, even though new forms of mass or team collaboration has just made meetings in virtual rooms possible. Business collaboration is an organizational phenomenon of historical conditions such as value creation based on division of labor, organizational structures, and procedural requirements aimed at raising the level of efficiency. But at the same time, the cooperation is also dependent on the mobilization and the coordinated approach of the involved parties. A major element here is the management of the human factor and the understanding of the partner. So business collaboration also includes a significant management dimension since it is important to steer the behavior of the actors in the right direction. Collaboration is necessary at many different levels in the company.