 The alternative approach to the adversarial tactics common in today's economy is for firms to encourage closer collaboration between them. Instead of acquisition, managers can utilize alliances to obtain the same desired result of growth in revenue and profit with less risk. Instead of browbeating suppliers into submission to reduce prices, initiating joint cost-sharing programs can yield even greater results. Whether they use alliances, cost sharing, joint ventures, or consortiums, they all fall under the broader term of collaboration. For our purposes, collaboration is any management practice that features close and organized or managed cooperation between independent firms. This attitude of cooperation involves participative planning to achieve a desired specific purpose. The main feature of a collaborative system that distinguishes it from the negative dictatorial command method is that here the involved parties work jointly as a common team, with each member being responsible for an assigned role.
Collaboration is the basis for bringing together the knowledge, experience and skills of multiple team members to contribute to the development of a new product more effectively than individual team members performing their narrow tasks in support of product development. As such collaboration is the basis for concepts such as concurrent engineering or integrated product development.
There are a variety of tools and technologies to facilitate communication and collaboration. Collaboration can happen synchronously where all participants view information and/or meet at the same time or asynchronously where participants view information and provide feedback at different points in time.
These tools and technologies include:
- Email exchange of drawings, models and project information
- Teleconferencing and videoconferencing
- Web-hosted meetings
- Project hosting tools to create one pool of all released project documentation, with email alerts for updates
- Drawing viewing sites (intranet and web-based) with view and mark-up capabilities
- CAD collaboration sessions
- Workflow and groupware software
- Product data management, product information management, collaborative product commerce
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