The Importance of Strategic Partnerships for Success
Partnerships are a strong and fruitful tool to deliver the best possible result and stay flexible.
In its heyday, the German Hanseatic League numbered 300 maritime and inland cities. It was a powerful ecosystem of diverse merchants. To this day, the Hanseatic League epitomizes partnerships: traveling the globe while focusing on mutual support and shared success. In fact, all this has a lot to do with how we live partnerships at diconium as well.
On the one hand, we maintain technology partnerships with other companies, which enable us to offer our customers customized solutions that are always geared to their highly individual needs. On the other hand, there are those partnerships that help us to scale our own business by supporting us internally with the appropriate services. Then there are those that enable us to live diconium as a global brand. These partners are there for our customers locally, where we ourselves cannot be present. What they all have in common is that they can each concentrate on their own strengths. We think beyond encrusted paths and unchangeable dogmas. This makes all our solutions efficient, scalable and future-oriented — regardless of the technology chosen. All for the benefit of customers.
A change in thinking is necessary
I often experience — especially in Germany — a great deal of skepticism among companies when it comes to partnerships. In my opinion, there is simply a lack of openness for this type of collaboration. Yet the potential is enormous if you recognize your counterpart not as a mere supplier, but as a partner.
In Germany, there is a lack of openness for partnerships
Even in the past, it was mostly partnerships and partnership-based ecosystems that led to economic success. For good reason, the cooperative idea is enjoying renewed popularity, especially in the digital age. “What one person can’t do alone, many can,” was the principle once coined by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen and Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, and it can certainly be applied to any form of a successful partnership.
Partners benefit from and strengthen each other. They help individuals to concentrate on their core business. “Interesting self-talk requires a clever partner,” as the English science fiction writer and pioneer of future-oriented literature H.G. Wells once put it.
Partnerships are needed for digital transformation
We are experiencing rapid technological change. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, the Internet of Things, blockchain, new realities. Our mobility is fundamentally changing, becoming more diverse and autonomous, greener, digital. Our factories are becoming smart, our production facilities are networked — we are generating a multitude of data that unfolds its full value when we share it with each other. Even across country and company boundaries.
Therefore, partnerships, ecosystems and collaborations are inherent to the digital age. After all, a company can only succeed in positioning itself as part of more complex ecosystems with partners if it musters the flexibility and speed it needs to respond agilely to the dynamics of our time.
That said, it is important to be clear about which essential components should remain within the company and which tools are more interchangeable and could be absorbed by the partner. These are the crucial points that we at diconium clarify in advance. This neutral attitude, which is also based on experience and expertise, helps to find the best solution for all parties involved.
All partnerships follow clear rules — with contracts and fixed budgets. At the same time, each partner has its own unique goals — however similar the markets in which they and the other partners operate may be. Our technology partners, for example, want to sell licenses, while we in turn want to deliver the best possible projects for our customers. This explains why we take a systems-agnostic approach in our day-to-day dealings with our partners. The needs of the customer and the issues of the market are what let us decide which partner from our ecosystem can support us best in each case. And incidentally, we all learn from the networked ecosystem at all times. It’s a win-win for everyone.
The Hanseatic League has endured for 500 years as arguably one of the most dynamic and powerful ecosystems in history. With our digital age, it’s important to remember what was instrumental in the Hanseatic League’s success: partnerships of equals — strengthening your own offering and increasing your reach.
