Collaborative Innovation and Business Benefits

Collaborative Innovation helps international organizations to solve critical issues of capacity and capability augmentation and cost optimization. More often than not, organizations seek engineering outsourcing as a collaborative option. Engineering outsourcing today has become more mature, with innovation driving the dynamics of every strategic outsourcing partnership. Pure-play sourcing relationships are slowly transforming into strategic partnerships that offer more flexibility, process scalability, and enhanced knowledge sharing to fuel business growth. A partnership that leverages in-depth understanding of primary product lines; promotes innovation right from product design through delivery; and clearly defines stakeholder responsibilities at both ends, is bound to succeed in the long run. A collaborative partnership offers some strategic business benefits:

• Reduced cycle time: Vendors help firms lower their time to market by enhancing the efficiency of non-core activities, thereby enabling clients to focus on their core
• Process improvements: Exposure to best practices of global clients helps ESOs bring about process improvements
• Scale and efficiency: ESO firms cater to multiple clients unlike an in-house setup and hence offer advantages of scale, which in turn enables them to provide a more efficient and cost-effective alternative to their clients
• Rise up the value chain: The success of the engineering services delivery model is determined by the co-innovator’s capability to provide the benefits of the three C’s namely – Cost, Capacity, and Capability

The benefits of a collaborative approach to engineering outsourcing go far beyond savings. Besides firing a passion for project innovation and growth, this model provides access to best-of-breed technologies and best practices, a wider talent pool, and top of the line business systems and processes. Continuous systemic improvement with enhanced knowledge transfer enables the partnership to direct strategic focus towards maximizing business value and gain competitive advantage in the long run.

So what are the four components of a successful collaborative innovation model and how does an organization go about choosing a partner who can foster innovation? Watch out for our next post on this.