Collaborative Advantage

The call for sectors to work collaboratively to provide integrated services is not new or unique to New Labour; but a combination of previous political approaches assumed to be more inclusive. The rhetoric of partnership is seen as essential to locate solutions to complex problems, with policies focusing on the socially disadvantaged. It could be argued that this thrust of partnership activity in different arenas and contexts highlights the terms’ ambiguity and despite the increased political interest, partnership remains ‘fuzzy’. It is described as the ‘indefinable in pursuit of the unachievable’ and despite the optimism of official documents there is an array of issues including the definition of partnership itself.

The call for sectors to work collaboratively to provide integrated services is not new or unique to New Labour; but a combination of previous political approaches assumed to be more inclusive. The rhetoric of partnership is seen as essential to locate solutions to complex problems, with policies focusing on the socially disadvantaged. It could be argued that this thrust of partnership activity in different arenas and contexts highlights the terms’ ambiguity and despite the increased political interest, partnership remains ‘fuzzy’. It is described as the ‘indefinable in pursuit of the unachievable’ and despite the optimism of official documents there is an array of issues including the definition of partnership itself.

Systems of secondary cities play a vital intermediary role as economic, administrative and logistics hubs within national and global systems of cities. They have three basic spatial typologies: regional hubs, metropolitan clusters, and corridors. The pattern, rate of development, and role of systems of secondary cities are changing rapidly in response to urbanisation, globalisation, structural economic change, new technologies, and the rapid development of transport and communications systems. These changes have resulted in a growing gap and inequities in sub-national regional economic development, income, wealth, investment, and employment opportunities within systems of secondary cities. Closing the gap has become a significant challenge for governments. Much of the literature on the development of secondary cities has tended to focus on enhancing the competitiveness of infrastructure, industry clusters, and enabling environments; however, there has been a tendency to overlook the importance of external factors: connectivity, networks, and collaboration, which significantly affect the performance of systems of secondary cities. This book seeks to address this knowledge gap. It examines ways secondary cities can work more collaboratively to improve their development prospects, lift prosperity, and leverage public resources to support equitable and sustainable sub-national economic growth and development. It outlines ways governments and other stakeholders within systems of secondary cities can invest strategically in public goods and services, improve connectivity, develop networks, and leverage common user facilities, infrastructure, and resources at different geographic levels to support inclusive, equitable, and sustainable development.

Collaborative governance institutions consisting of government and civil society actors often emerge to solve complex policy problems.  Yet decades of research on collaborative governance has found that realizing the ‘collaborative advantage’ is often very difficult given the multitude of actors, organizations and interests to be managed.  This article deploys a participant observation approach that also harnesses data from a natural experiment in collaborative governance for homelessness policy in Vancouver, Canada, to reveal the distinct collaborative advantage produced in terms of policy, using empirical decision data and counterfactual analysis.  The data reveal that nearly 50% of the policy decisions made in the collaborative institution would not be made in the alternative scenario of unilateral bureaucratic control.  The collaborative advantage realized in this governance institution that is premised on horizontality, deliberation and diversity is the result of a series of small interventions and the strategic deployment of rules devised by the bureaucratic metagovernor in charge of steering the governance collaboration.

Homelessness is not a historical accident. We know that it is the disastrous outcome of policy decisions made over time and at several levels of government. Yet conventional theories in political science and public administration fail to explain why some approaches have worked while others have failed.

Drawing on network governance theory, extended participant observation, and more than sixty interviews with key policy figures, Carey Doberstein investigates how government and civil-society actors in three major Canadian cities have organized themselves to solve public problems. In Vancouver and Calgary, where governance networks include affordable-housing providers, mental health and addiction professionals, Aboriginal community members, representatives of drop-in centres, and others with lived experience, homelessness is on the decline. In Toronto, where government-level decision-making was closed to civil-society actors during the period of investigation, homelessness levels remained stagnant.

Doberstein concludes that having a progressive city council is not enough. Civil-society organizations and actors must have genuine access to the channels of government power in order to work with policy makers to develop innovative and comprehensive solutions. He reveals how program and system coordination and policy innovation are more likely to be generated from within such network governance structures -- not imposed from above.

Within the context of virtual organization, Knowledge Management is subject to some drastic transformations related to rapid technological innovation such as cloud computing platforms, increasing globalization, evolution of technological capabilities, and analytical developments of network approach. Research paper study forms, functions and effectiveness of single-firm strategies with the key players in its process-oriented working environment. An ontological-based approach was used in order to investigate relationship in three dimensions: knowledge creation, learning and collaboration. I gathering data from a literature review, from online Google survey and from websites of four different companies which aims to use cloud integration with Google platform. Results show that trust and deep commitment developed through processes enhanced transformation of cooperation into collaboration. As a future research I prupose measure of innovative output of knowledge creation, learning and collaboration trough patents for technology other then cloud computing platforms.