© 2002 Makesfive ltd & EDuce ltd

WHAT IS THE SITE ABOUT?


Essentials of Business Partnering provides guidance to help businesses make the most of collaboration with other businesses and with public agencies. These relationships include, for example:

    • joint ventures
    • strategic alliances
    • supply chain partnering
    • marketing and purchasing co-operatives
    • sector & cluster groups
    • networks
You will find content useful in planning and developing your own business and in situations where you're working with others. Some material will also be helpful to those acting as facilitators in bringing together businesses as partners or in strengthening existing partnership and networking arrangements.

Working in partnership potentially offers great benefits for businesses, creating new opportunities and driving up competitiveness. Partnership also presents costs and risks which need to be managed well.

Extensive research shows that many business partnerships and alliances often don't fulfil expectations and many disband early. Accenture*, for example, finds that 90% of all alliance negotiations fail to reach agreements, and of those that are set up, over 61% either fail to satisfy expectations or fail completely. This is in a context where "....today, global companies with successful alliances receive more than 20% of their revenues from alliances; in Europe, the figure is closer to 30%."

Accenture concludes that the main reason for poor performance is that "Most companies have yet to master the art of the alliance".

*(i) "Dispelling the Dispelling the Myths of Alliances - the new realities of successful alliance management", 1999
(ii) "Grasping the Capability" from The Point, Volume 2 No.1, 2002.

Prompts

On a number of pages we have included prompting questions to get you thinking
about your own partnering initiative.
These should help direct your thoughts.

One of our key messages is that partnering won't happen on its own:
like any strategy, the investment needs to be made.
But if it's going to pay off, well...

 

Makesfive ltd and EDuce ltd will work with you to help with the many challenges that partnership working raises. We'll provide the independent expertise and third party input that partnerships often need and it will be tailored to your individual needs, to make sure that the chances of success are as good as they can be.

CLICK HERE to contact us.