Collaborative enterprising

SDG11: Sustainable Cities and Communities - Learning Resource supports the SDGs - UN-Guidelines

Collaborative Enterprising is an approach for independent operating economical units in conjunction with research and development units. The units can be

• self-employed professionals,
• small and medium business enterprises (SME) or
• even units in a large company that can operate independently.

Learning Tasks

• (Agile Developement) Identify the role of agile and flexible business structure that enables the self-organisation for those units into competitive and sustainable business network. The networks of enterprises must assure that the collaborative works generates a benefit for all enterprises in a mutual accepted way.
• (COVID-19 Innovation and Risk Mitigation) Explain how small and medium business enterprise can use collaborative enterprising approach to create innvoation that creates a sustainable transformation of workflows with a sustainable business model.
• (The winner-takes-it-all) The winner-takes-it-all strategy must be avoided in the sense that finding solutions in a collaborative way (e.g. collaborative research and development) produces a few successful tries. E.g. 100 different test scenarios are shared among the different SMEs and development units. How successful these scenarios are in a pre-assessment might vary. The outcome is that 1 test scenario with a high risk of failure and 1 test scenario with low risk of failure. These agile development leads to 98 failures of test scenarios and 2 successes. In a collaborative scenario most of SMEs or self-employed professional or in general collaborativ operating units failed. Nevertheless they supported the problem solving and finding successful test scenarios. Explain why a winner-takes-it-all strategy has negative impact on a sustainable collaboration of collaborative enterprising.
• (Benefits of Collaborative Enterprising) Explain how a collaborative network of enterprises can be established without the requirement for capital, infrastructure or additional fixed employment? What are your strategies to establish the collaborative effort and how can you assure that others participate from the collaborative effort in fair approach. Assume we can establish this approach with almost zero fixed costs, how would you share the benefit according to the investment of person hours into the collaborative approach.
• (Open Community Approach - OCA) If you address this collaborative effort from the angle of the Open Community Approach and the investment of the development of product that can be used for providing a payed service, then Open Source and Open Content are developed for a mutual use for all involved units working in the collaborative way. This approach is suitable for collaborative enterprising if they are going to provide services to customers, such as consultants, freelancers, coaches, home based businesses, assistants providing support with video conferencing infrastructure. For applicaation in an economical context there must be a
• Pre-OCA phase and
• an OCA phase of collaborative enterprising.

During the Pre-OCA phase all developements are used just as they would used in a collaborative enterprising approach in the private sector by a network of collaborative operating SMEs or self-employed professional. This covers all the costs of participating units and provides the maximum revenue that must be generated by collaborative enterprising approach. The Pre-OCA phase can take longer due to slower economic success or could have a rapid development due to very good market success. Nevertheless it is recommended that there is maximum time span for the Pre-OCA phase, because the after the Pre-OCA phase the enterpreneural units will work in new networks and they use the product in new collaborative settings. This is important because the SMEs and must assure, that self-employed professionals like consultants, freelancers, coaches, ... can the use the jointly developed product afterwards without the dependency on the previous collaborative partners. Collaboration might not end in harmony all the time and a well-defined exit strategy has to incorporate also the post "collaborative enterprising" use.

• (Collaborative) Compare the approach of Collaborative Mapping with Collaborative Enterprising. What are similarities and what are the differences between those approaches.
• (Swarm Intelligence) How is collaborative enterprising linked to Swarm Intelligence and what are the additional aspects that must be considered in an economical environment.
• (Commercial Data Harvesting) How is Commercial Data Harvesting related to this concept? Discuss benefits and drawbacks?

See also

• Risk Management
• Risk Literacy
• Close-to-Homeoffice
• COVID-19/Economy
• COVID-19/Workflow Transformation
• Swarm Intelligence
• Systems Thinking