Your ability to get the most from technology and services partners is a core competency for success in today’s ecosystem-driven businesses. We’ve been highlighting the strategies and execution to achieve this over the years. We call it co-innovation — working with partners to co-create solutions that drive your business forward. To illustrate the benefits, we mined the submissions for the 2022 Technology Strategy Impact Awards and identified four best practices for getting the most value from partners:

  1. Co-create solutions that transform your business. Co-innovation works when you stop asking “How much value can I extract from partners?” and start asking “How much value can we create together?” You unlock the power of co-innovation when both partners are motivated to achieve the same goal. The control dynamic changes, with innovation moving throughout the ecosystem of partners to create opportunities for all parties.
  2. Get help with developing and operating your core business capabilities. In a strategy we call future fit partner strategy, the best firms tap co-innovation partners’ end-to-end expertise assets, alliances, automation, and solutions to accelerate and scale the platforms that drive your business.
  3. Improve innovation through emerging technologies. Co-innovation partners don’t spend as much time learning and coding on your time. Instead, they invest in their own partnerships with software, cloud, data, and business providers to jump-start the work. You benefit from those alliances and their offerings because with partnership comes expertise and access to the engineering teams and roadmaps. This allows quicker innovation and, in time, faster and more business-ready adoption of emerging technology.
  4. Increase the value and effectiveness of your ecosystems. A key part of your future fit tech strategy is building the capability to choose and manage an ecosystem of partners, including technology, business, and services partners. A co-innovation partner will help you integrate and coordinate their contributions to achieve your outcomes.

Our new report What Makes A Future Fit Partner Strategy? illustrates these best practices with examples. Learn how a network of health providers is leveraging AI to drive operational excellence, how an equipment maker is scaling commerce capabilities across diverse business units, and more.

And if you are leveraging strategic partners in a unique way, tell us about it in an entry to Forrester’s 2023 Technology Strategy Impact Awards before the deadline of Monday, June 19, 2023. To view complete award nomination criteria and submit an entry, visit here (NA), here (EMEA), or here (APAC). Good luck in the awards!