Collaborative Communities

Collaborative Communities: Partnering for Profit in the Networked Economy challenges your most deeply held assumptions about how to build a profitable business. It is the first and only book to show how to organize your business around customers in collaboration with business partners and suppliers.

Business is going through a revolution, and companies and industries as we know them are ceasing to exist. Regardless of how long you've been in business, how many customers you have, or what your company's revenues and profits are, the Collaborative Community "TM" is the business pattern for achieving success in the networked economy.

Business is quickly becoming defined by what individual customers want rather than by what businesses choose to make available. Customers increasingly expect to collaborate in the development of personalized goods, services, and information. The problem, quite simply, is that business structures that prevail in our economy are not designed to fulfill the needs and wants of knowledgeable and powerful customers.

The challenge facing all businesspeople is to disregard how their business works today, discard their legacy thinking, and take out a "clean sheet of paper". Then, beginning with the customer, work through the value creation process, developing an understanding of when, where, and how value is created.

Collaborative Communities explains in detail how to build this new business pattern -- the seamless alliance of businesses that's best able to profitably satisfy the shared set of needs and wants of a virtual customer community. The alliance is led by a "choreographer", a business whose function is to balance the satisfaction of customers' personalneeds with the needs of the business members. Collaborative Communities tells you everything you need to know to benefit from this emerging business pattern -- from gaining customer loyalty to growing profitably and increasing shareholder value in the networked economy.