Copenhagen Conference on Partnerships: Achieving Collaborative Advantage

Conference arranged by International Center for Business and Politics & Center for Strategic Management and Globalization.

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For industry giants and ambitious start-ups alike, strategic partnerships have become central to competitive success in fast-changing global markets […]. In this new world of networks, coalitions, and alliances, strategic partnerships are not an option but a necessity” (Doz and Hamel 1998: ix).

Partnerships have become a reality for public and private organizations alike. For many private sector businesses, cooperation with other companies has become an important means of enhancing competitive advantage. And, in the public sector, cooperation with private sector organizations is viewed as an important way to improve public service delivery.

Partnerships have become a regular feature of organizational life in both the public and the private domain. They are established in order to create synergistic effects for the participating partners; to generate some sort of collaborative advantage (Huxham and Vangen 2000). However, often well-intentioned efforts of achieving collaborative synergy frequently turn into collaborative inertia at the point where good intentions meet practical reality. Conflicting goals, cultural differences, or lack of trust; the reasons for disagreement seem plentiful. This conference seeks to illuminate why this is the case.

The conference

The aim of the conference is twofold. First, the objective is to enhance our understanding of how partnerships function in practice; what does it take to redeem the promises of collaborative advantage? Second, the objective is to cross-fertilize research on private-private partnerships (alliances) and public-private partnerships (PPP), as these two research fields share many common topics.

In particular, with this conference we wish to illuminate what role factors other than formal structures play in relation to overall partnership performance. For instance, what is the importance of operational processes and behavioural aspects of cooperation? This perspective has until now been wholly black-boxed in relation to PPPs, and compared to the amount of work done on formal structures and formative issues, it has also been relatively neglected in alliance research.