A few weeks ago I wrote a blog for The Guardian Media Network on collaboration, which you can read here. They inevitably edited the article a bit, so below is the original, which contained a few more examples of great collaborations:

Collaborations are messy, mercurial things. They take up time, can lead to weeks of negotiations and sometimes don’t produce the things you hoped for. But with the right partnership, an investment of time and a fair wind they can deliver new ways of working and new types of work that will out-shine anything you could have done on your own.

Watershed is 30 years old this year and for a lot of our adult organisational life we have built our business around media and technology collaborations. From SE3D, a major partnership with HP Labs around animation and cloud computing to the more recent development of The Pervasive Media Studio –a multi-disciplinary lab for artists, creative companies, technologists and academics, we believe that collaborating with people who aren’t like you leads to new business, unexpected creativity and substantial value.

But getting collaboration right takes effort and an open-ness to change, especially in the media/technology world, where digital innovations are challenging the organisational culture of the monoliths. All too often I hear of X large company bringing in Y ‘boutique’ agency to re-invent their brand, build a community, launch an app. Too often good intentions default to old behaviours and promised changes are only implemented as long as they look and smell exactly like what they have done before. The internet doesn’t respect departmental procedures or old structures based on industrial processes. It has a different temporality and collaborations require a re-thinking of culture to flourish.

So, if its all so difficult, why bother? Because when it works, the results are profound, lucrative and joyful, as my conversations with some of Watershed’s collaborators illustrate:

Matter2Media and Prototype Theater

Matter2Media technologist Tim Kindberg collaborated with Proto-type Theater[5] on their Fortnight Project, a two-week performance experience located in the spaces, technologies and occurrences of a city.

“This was a case of technological ingredients I'd used many times before (QR, RFID, SMS, email, web) but which Proto-type required to be put together in a new way.” Engagement with the user was through several overlapping channels concurrently: the physical world (portals and posters), the mobile phone and the web. Technically as well as artistically, it was more than the sum of its parts.

Using this learning and the same technical infrastructure, Tim built a (very different) app for a completely different setting: a Facebook-linked launch extravaganza for the Ford Focus.

“Fortnight helped me conceive of what I do in a new way (however obvious in retrospect): instead of building apps that run in the mobile phone and which people carry everywhere, I build apps that run in places, and are realised in the fabric of the world.”

Hide&Seek and Royal Opera House

In Autumn 2011 Hide&Seek and The Royal Opera House launched The Show Must Go On, an iPhone game that puts the player in the shoes of an intrepid stage manager struck down by a terrible case of bad luck. The creation of an opera-based mobile game was a new departure for both companies and Alex Fleetwood of Hide&Seek cites the open-ness of the initial brief as an essential ingredient in its success, enabling a shared exploration of how to create a game that would appeal to a wide range of players.

He also cites the need for cross-department buy-in to ensure a project is not only made, but finds its audience “We needed support from all departments to release the project, but despite best intentions it can sometimes be hard to get attention at key moments. In future we would build in more time for co-location of teams. You can’t replace face to face, in the moment, communication”.

PIAS Media and Mativision

Seth Jackson of Independent music group PIAS Media first bumped into Antonis, the man behind Mativision, in a hotel lobby in Texas. It was another piece of 360 video capture technology and he wasn’t holding out much hope, but what made this meeting different was the passion in Antonis’ presentation, he wasn’t trying to sell a service but to partner with PIAS to create a new way of capturing live music together. “The huge difference between a collaboration and a simple supplier relationship is the massive investment in time, energy and passion that both parties put into the project. The risk involved means that when it works, the outcomes are amplified”

The collaboration started by turning Seasick Steve’s performance at the annual Streets of London Concert into an intimate 360 hi-definition video stream and has grown to include large-scale live events like the recent PIAS Nites in Eindhoven. It is lalso eading to new business for both partners around festivals and major brands.

To enable successes like these, it is important to acknowledge and celebrate the differences in your culture, timescales and language, whilst also being willing to let some of them go. And when they throw up problems (which they will) keep talking (and crucially listening).

In the next few weeks Watershed will officially begin a partnership with five universities under the banner of REACT, a £4.8 million AHRC-funded Hub supporting new creative economy collaborations. As I sit in pre-project meetings with lawyers and accountants, a minnow in terms of size and turn over, I try to remember other hard learnt lessons about building successful collaborations:

• Try not to sit in meetings discussing a collaboration, start making stuff. A sprint (a focused time-limited period of shared development) is a good place to start
• Be honest about what you expect from the partnership at the outset. This doesn’t have to be the same thing but you should be clear on why you are collaborating
• The inevitable and endless concerns over IP are often a red herring. Be generous and be sure about what you are willing to give away, you will be repaid handsomely in ways you cannot yet fathom. If you are not as interested in the process as the product itself, consider hiring a supplier not creating a partnership
• Know how much risk you are prepared to take and consider where you will draw the line
• Stay open to the stuff you didn’t expect. Plan for emergent outcomes and be willing to change direction to create maximum value
• The contracting bit is hard, especially if a big institution is involved or you haven’t worked together before. It can move at glacial speeds, illuminate worries and encourage defensive behaviour. Keep going, its better to get these issues ironed out before the fun bit starts.