The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age

Collaborate Strategy
The collaborate strategy for business is to invite your customers to help 
build your enterprise. A collaborate strategy is distinct from a connect 
strategy in that the company invites customers not just to share informa-
tion but also to work together in a focused way toward a shared goal or 
objective, using open platforms. Wikipedia is still the touchstone example 
of digital collaboration that most people are familiar with—an unmatched 
public resource, generated almost entirely by the volunteer efforts of con-
tributors around the world. But Wikipedia has evolved only through care-
ful iterations of its editorial process to ensure its reliability and usefulness. 
Mass collaboration does not happen without careful attention to creating 
the right context and the right motivations for participants to take action 
and to feel they are being fairly treated.
We see a few well-established broad approaches to a collaborate strat-
egy, including passive contribution, active contribution, crowdfunding, 
open competitions, and collaborative platforms.
r
 Passive contribution: Sometimes collaboration can involve as little as cus-
tomers’ consent so that actions they are already taking can be used to 
power a collective project. The Waze navigation app is one such collab-
orative tool; simply by driving a car with the mobile app running, each 
customer provides real-time data on the speed of traffic and best routes to 
destinations. Duolingo, a free language-learning app, includes translation 

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homework for students—and then uses those homework assignments to 
power the second part of its business, a Web translation tool.
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 Active contribution: In other cases, customers are invited to contribute 
their efforts directly to a cause, taking on a small part of a large project. 
CNN’s iReport allows anyone to contribute photos, videos, or eyewit-
ness reports to a crowdsourced journalism website. When the images 
or stories are particularly newsworthy, they are picked up and included 
in the main CNN news broadcast, with credit given to the “iReporter” 
who happened to be on the scene.
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 Crowdfunding: A type of active contribution that has become quite wide-
spread, crowdfunding is the process of seeking collaborators to contrib-
ute to and raise funds for a new project, product launch, or initiative. 
Crowdfunding started as a way for artists to raise funds but quickly 
spread as a means to raise seed capital for new businesses (including 
start-ups Oculus Rift and Pebble Watch) and diverse other ventures. In 
some markets, crowdfunded projects are legally allowed to grant equity 
directly to funders. This approach has been used by real estate crowd-
funder Prodigy Network to raise the capital for and begin construction 
of the tallest building in Colombia, the BD Bacatá skyscraper.
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 Open competitions: Some problems cannot be easily divided among 
contributors. In these cases, competitions can be used to enlist a 
diverse group to find the best answer or solution. Cisco has invested in 
a variety of innovation competitions, from an I-Prize business model 
competition, to hackathons for outside programmers to develop tech-
nical solutions, to the Internet of Things. InnoCentive hosts a network 
of over 300,000 “solvers”—scientists, engineers, and technical experts 
around the world—who can be tapped by any company seeking to run 
a competition to solve an intractable R&D challenge.
r
 Collaborative platforms: In this approach, the business creates a con-
text for collaboration but lets the network of collaborators define the 
challenges to be addressed. In the iPhone’s second year on the market, 
Apple opened up the operating system as a platform for collaboration. 
This experiment triggered the explosion of outside innovation that is 
the App Store. A good collaborative platform doesn’t try to define what 
the next crop of projects should be; it focuses on providing a structure 
on which others can build. (We’ll see much more on platform business 
models in the next chapter.)
The keys to a collaborate strategy are understanding the motivations 
of your contributors, giving everyone a stake (so no one feels exploited), 

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allowing participants to contribute at their proper level of expertise, and 
offering freedom for contributors to bring their own ideas while providing 
enough guidance to shape an effective final outcome.
We now have a clear understanding of the five customer network strat-
egies. But how do you choose between them and know which to apply in 
a given business situation? That is the aim of this chapter’s tool, which we 
will see next.
Tool: The Customer Network Strategy Generator
The Customer Network Strategy Generator is designed to help you develop 
new strategic ideas for engaging and creating value with networked cus-
tomers. It does this by linking your own business objectives to the core 
behaviors of customer networks that we have examined in this chapter. 
It can be used to generate new marketing communications and customer 
experiences as well as new product and service innovations.
The tool follows a five-step process for generating new strategic ideas 
(see figure 2.5). Let’s look at each of the steps in detail.
Figure 2.5 
The Customer Network Strategy Generator.