7 - Collaboration, trust, and the Structure of Relationships

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The literature on ‘open innovation’ and the analysis in chapter 3 recommend collaboration between organisations as a source of innovation. Dutch and eu innovation policy, on all spatial levels (regional, national, supra-national), have caught on to the trend of ‘open innovation’, in the stimulation and even organisation of collaboration, networks, and local ‘clusters’. However, collaboration is often risky and difficult, and frequently fails. So, we need to consider the governance of collaborative relationships.

This, I propose, entails a shift in the notion of governance. Traditionally, concepts of governance have been oriented towards control. The World Bank defined governance as the way in which power is exercised, the UNDP defined it as the exercise of economic, political, and administrative authority, and the OECD defined it as the use of political authority and exercise of control (Weiss 2000). In a world of relationships and networks for collaboration, approaches of implicitly or explicitly unilateral control, authority and power are no longer adequate, because there is no central authority or controller. The economic perspective of ‘principal-agent’ relationships and the business perspective of ‘marketing warfare’ have become counterproductive. In relationships of collaboration, players are each others’ agents as well as principals. Operation in markets is not warfare but alliance management. Governance in networks must be multilateral, in equilibration of power or dependence, somehow. If we can still talk of control, it must be mutual control.

It is routinely recognised that collaboration requires trust. Especially in innovation, uncertainty is too large to allow for complete contractual control. The uncertainty of innovation makes it difficult to foresee what needs to be contracted for (tasks, rights, duties, penalties, responsibilities, goals, competencies), the novel opportunities that will require a change of direction, the pressures that may tempt people to renege on commitments, and the avenues available to conduct such escape. Beyond technical uncertainty for contracting, there is the more fundamental uncertainty in exploration, or in ‘interpretation’ as Lester & Piore (2004) called it, that goals, means, and their causal connections and resource requirements are not yet known, so that the actors involved must take the time to deal with ambiguity, and to iterate between goals and means, without knowing where they will wind up.