The essence of strategic partnerships can be defined as parties together achieving strategic goals impossible to achieve on their own.

Perhaps your closest competitor in reality is a potential business partner. Maybe we can even get them to do some of our work, or take some of our investments? Collaborating with competitors can strengthen corporate relationships, even while maintaining competition. But acting as partner, supplier, customer and competitor in the same relationship is an art. It requires experience and the right approach. Competition is based on rivalry while cooperation is based on trust and harmony. How do we manage the dilemmas and tensions of collaborating and competing simultaneously in our business relationships?

Temporary and short collaborations combined with important long-term relationships can create both dynamics and tensions. Companies need to maintain control while collaborating with competitors. This opens up the need for new business models. For collaborations with competitors to work, companies also need to share enough information, but without locking themselves in by providing too much information.

• Build legitimacy
• Accept the game rules
• Be mobile as a company and flexible in the roles
• Share enough information – Dealing with temporality and instability