What this is about
The beginning is not a search for partners but a question to yourself: what do I need to reach my goal? Not every project that requires other people requires cooperation. This phase clarifies whether it has to be collaboration, or whether a purchase, a commission or your own organisation will do.
The guiding question
Does my goal need the goals of others – or only their performance?
If you need a service, you buy it or commission it. The other side pursues its own aim, usually the fee, and the relationship ends once the work is delivered and paid for. Both remain who they were. Cooperation begins where my goal can only be reached if the other person also wants something of their own and brings it into the project: their judgement, their ideas, their responsibility. Then their goals help shape mine. That is the price of cooperation, and also its return.
What helps now
Distinguish exchange from acting together. In an exchange, performance and counter-performance face each other. In acting together, contributions work towards a third thing that belongs to no one alone. A translation job is an exchange. A book written jointly by two authors is cooperation, even if one writes more than the other. Many projects lie in between, and an exchange that is meant to last grows into cooperation over time. It helps to be honest about where yours lies.
Weigh three routes: market, own organisation, cooperation. What can be clearly described and bought belongs on the market. What is needed permanently and must be closely steered often belongs inside your own organisation, through hiring or building your own capabilities. Cooperation is worthwhile where neither fits: where the result only emerges from working together, where no one has all the necessary skills alone, and where no one is meant to direct the other. Institutional economics speaks of hybrid forms between market and hierarchy.
Know your own contribution. Cooperation requires you to bring something the others need. Anyone who only wants to take is looking for a supplier and calling it a partner. If the others can do without your contribution, your voice will count for less in the cooperation too.
Count the cost of doing things together. Deciding together takes longer than deciding alone. Coordination, consideration and living with other people’s ideas cost time and energy. These costs are not a sign of failure; they belong to cooperation. They pay off only when the result could not come about at all without the goals of the others, not merely when it gets somewhat better with them.
The typical mistake
Cooperation by default. There is no budget for a commission and no capacity to build the skill in-house, so the wish for a cheap service turns into a “partnership”. The other side soon notices that their goals are not wanted and that they are expected to deliver without having a say. Such cooperations rarely fail in open dispute, more often in quiet disappointment: one side wanted a partner, the other a supplier. If you need a commission, call it that and pay for it.
It also goes wrong the other way round: a project that needs shared judgement is handed out as a mere commission. The other side then delivers exactly what was ordered, and the result still misses the goal, because no one but the client was supposed to think about it.
Online
Online, what grows most is the range of services you can buy, including from other countries and time zones. Here it is especially easy to mistake a contractor for a partner: finding someone for a task through a platform usually leads to an exchange contract, however friendly and close the collaboration may be.
Conversely, many cooperations arise online that nobody calls by that name: a reading group that meets regularly, an open working group, a jointly maintained project. It pays to recognise early that people are acting together. This has consequences, legal ones included. Those who commit with others to pursuing a common purpose may have formed a civil-law partnership (GbR) without knowing it (Section 705(1) German Civil Code (BGB)).
Law in this phase
- Cooperation as a legal relationship: Why collaboration creates more duties than a simple exchange of performances.
- The cooperation agreement: How to agree on collaboration without founding a company or partnership.
- Contract for work: The typical exchange contract (Werkvertrag), which already shows traits of cooperation because the work often depends on the client’s participation (Section 642 BGB).