How Your Business Will Profit from Innovative Collaboration

Drive Strategic Collaboration

Imagine a world where your customers want your organization to succeed. Where your employees are personally committed to your company’s success. Where your organization is not focused only on its own results, but on a collaborative effort that spans a community and beyond.

David Nour’s new book, CO-CREATE: How Your Business Will Profit from Innovative and Strategic Collaboration, takes these dreams on as he explores ways to drive strategy and innovation. His new work challenges us to think about relationships in a completely different way. I recently asked him about his work and new book.

“Your brand identity is beyond your control.” -David Nour

Co-creation. Share with our audience what it is and why it’s important.

It means collaborating with your most valuable business relationships to transform your business or revenue model. It can drive how you iterate, innovate or disrupt your market and in the process, evolve far beyond anything you could do alone.

“Introspection leads to right action.” -David Nour

You start the book by saying that, “Introspection leads to right action.” What’s the best way to do this?

Real introspection takes three critical elements:

Think Time – Unfortunately, given the hectic pace most of us work these days, we don’t get enough quality think time to set the minutia of the day aside and really consider our relevant strengths and strategic relationships, as well as personal or professional growth opportunities.
An Inner Circle – We need to surround ourselves with fewer, but more authentic and impactful, business relationships. Most of us could dramatically benefit from fewer partnerships and alliances and more thought partners who will tell us what we need to hear.
Leading Drivers – We can’t raise the bar on our intellect, performance, execution and results… if we don’t measure leading drivers of our progress—not lagging indicators of where we’ve been, but predictive insights toward where we’re headed. You can’t win a race looking in the rear view mirror. Focus your energies on the road ahead.