An interesting phenomenon is increasingly showing itself in the tertiary student classes that I teach at the Eastern Institute of Technology – it’s called “collaboration“. For the ‘Operations Management’ class that I teach in conjunction with my colleague who is based in Gisborne, students have just been given their major assignment for the current semester.
In response, unprompted and unsolicited, a student in this class decided to help her student colleagues by coming forward to share a particular website which she had found useful in understanding how to perform correct APA referencing – which is a fundamental requirement of tertiary students when preparing assignments/ reports.
The level of student contributions to class discussions is increasing steadily as the semester rolls-on also. And more than that, students are learning how to constructively challenge the views of their fellow students and/ or add to what another student has spoken about without causing conflict. Yes, clear signs of collaboration are showing themselves more and more now.
As I shared with my learned Gisborne colleague last week after the aforementioned student had stepped forward with her thoughtful offer of a useful website for her student colleagues to consider using, I believe that the New Zealand business community as a whole has a prime opportunity to carve-out a massive comparative advantage on the global stage by concentrating more on developing collaborative business models (e.g. joint ventures, merged entities, SME scale businesses operating under a parent company brand, etc) versus continuing to persevere with around 90 % of N.Z.’s businesses being Small-Medium Enterprise (SME) scale businesses – many of which may prove to be unsustainable and unfortunately ultimately become unviable (particularly if historic N.Z. business failure rate statistics are any sort of indicator of likely future trends).
So my underlying message to Kiwi business owners is…Collaborate in order to strengthen the skills base per organisation…to improve affordability of inputs (including Research & Development)…to increase/ improve productivity, innovation and volume of output…to increase revenue…to increase market share…to increase scale…to enable entry into other countries…to enable further employment opportunities.
All that it takes fundamentally is the “willingness” to become more “collaborative” and “cooperative” as a mindset and way of life.