May 03, 2022
Article Published by John Moore, Senior Feature Writer at Tech Target – SearchITChannel

Partner Ecosystem Strategy: Co-Innovation, Co-Creation, Strategic Partnerships…What are the Benefits?

The terms carry different shades of meaning, but they all stem from the same forces to create new ways forward to engineer the future landscape.

Industry partnerships are key to helping our customers achieve an optimum balance between sustainment and innovation. IT services, customers, and technology providers are reinventing how they work together in a partner ecosystem to develop modern solutions – solutions that must be future ready, adaptable, resilient, and responsive to changing business needs.

As a result, a growing number of engagements feature closer relationships, a focus on measurable business outcomes, high-functioning teams with multi-talented resources, and a willingness to create entirely new offerings. Technical complexity, time-to-market demands, and IT skills shortages – encourage alliances and the motivation to rethink partnerships that offer innovation and newer collaboration approaches to foster long-term customer relationships. Such collaborative approaches operate under several labels: co-innovation, generative partnering,  co-creation, service creation, and strategic partnerships.

Brendan Walsh, SVP Partner Programs with 1901 Group, Leidos stated that “The speed of technology change is getting faster and faster. The pace of development favors partnering over building technology in-house or buying it through an acquisition. Partnering is going to become bigger versus creating everything on your own.”

Walsh, along with several distinguished experts from Gartner, Forrester, and DataArt discussed the emerging set of alliances fall into several categories that include co-innovation, generative partnering, co-creation, service creation, and strategic partnerships.

“The strategic partnership is that one-two punch of innovation and go-to-market, together,” Walsh noted. The strategic partnership brings together a services provider and a technology vendor or vendors that co-develop technology and also pursue a joint marketing strategy. Companies entering such partnerships must focus on the operational details, particularly when it comes to defining who does what in a relationship. To that end, the RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) matrix provides a mechanism for assigning roles.

Those emerging partner ecosystem approaches lend themselves to the boldest business and technology initiatives and require ongoing collaboration between business and technical resources. Collaborating with a partner discussion focused on strategic problem solving rather than transactional sales can make the goals easier for customers to achieve.

Full article at Tech Target – SearchITChannel

 

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