The Collaboration Deficit: What the Research Reveals, and What Still Needs Saying

by Howard Betts

6 August 2026

Most partnerships fail. Not because the organisations involved didn't want them to succeed – but because wanting is not the same as knowing how.

The evidence is striking.

A recent report by McKinsey & Company¹, one of the world's leading management consulting firms, examined the state of partnership between large corporates and high-growth technology companies across Europe. What they found should give every senior leader pause.

Only around 20% of European corporates actively collaborate with scale-ups (businesses that have moved beyond proof of concept and are growing fast) compared with roughly 50% in the United States.

More striking still, fewer than 5% of partnerships formally evaluated through pilots or proofs of concept ever reach commercial scale. The vast majority are initiated, assessed, and quietly abandoned; the corporate and the scale-up each returning to their separate corners having invested time, resource, and goodwill in something that never delivered.

The prize being surrendered in the process is not trivial. McKinsey estimates that in European deep tech alone, closing this collaboration gap could generate up to $1 trillion in enterprise value and create one million jobs by 2030. European software scale-ups currently take an average of 15 years to reach €100 million in annual recurring revenue: five years longer than their US counterparts. The gap is not innovation. Europe has no shortage of that. The gap is commercialisation. And commercialisation, at its core, depends on collaboration that actually functions.

What makes the McKinsey findings particularly significant, and particularly relevant to the work of ICW and its members, is their diagnosis of why collaboration fails at this scale. They do not point to fragmented capital markets or structural complexity. They do not blame European regulation or structural complexity. They identify it, clearly and directly, as a collaboration failure; one that sits within the control of private-sector actors to address.

For those of us who have spent careers working on exactly that problem, the report is both validating and, if we are honest, a little familiar.

We Have Been Here Before

The language changes. The data updates. The sectors rotate. But the underlying diagnosis has remained remarkably consistent across four decades of organisational life.

Organisations announce partnerships. They sign agreements. They issue joint press releases. They create governance structures and steering committees and joint working groups. And then, with depressing regularity, the relationship defaults, under the first real pressure, to self-protection, contractual compliance, and the quiet burial of anything that genuinely required one party to put the other's interests alongside their own.

The McKinsey data quantifies what practitioners have long observed qualitatively. The 95% failure rate in partnership commercialisation is not surprising to anyone who has sat in the room when a collaboration begins to fracture. What is perhaps more surprising is that it continues to surprise the organisations experiencing it.

The Language Problem

Part of the difficulty lies in the vocabulary itself.

In the course of working with organisations across sectors from defence, infrastructure, technology, professional services, public sector to pharmaceuticals, and retail, I have watched the terms joint venture, partnership, alliance, consortium, teaming arrangement, and collaboration used as if they were synonyms. They are not.

Each carries a different implication about governance, risk distribution, legal standing, and, most critically, the depth of relational commitment the arrangement actually demands. A joint venture creates a legal entity with shared equity and mutual liability. True alliancing involves integrated teams, pain/gain share, and governance structures that make adversarial behaviour structurally irrational. A teaming agreement may be little more than a pre-bid commercial arrangement with no binding collaborative obligation beyond the tender.

When these terms are used interchangeably, something important is lost; not just semantic precision, but the shared relational contract that determines how people actually behave when the arrangement comes under pressure.

If one party enters a relationship believing they are in a partnership, with all the transparency and mutual investment that implies, while the other treats it as a preferred supplier arrangement with a friendlier label, neither is wrong given their frame. But the collision, when it comes, is not an accident. It was written into the relationship from the beginning, in the gap between what each party meant when they used the same word.

The Behavioural Gap

McKinsey's report points toward stronger, more systematic partnership infrastructure as the solution. They are right. But infrastructure is not sufficient on its own, and this is where the conversation needs to go further than the report takes it.

The failure of collaboration is rarely a failure of intent. Organisations do not generally enter partnerships planning to underdeliver on their relational commitments. The failure is almost always a failure of activation: the gap between what leaders espouse in the partnership launch and what their systems, incentives, and deeply held beliefs about self-interest actually produce when things get difficult.

This is not a new observation. Argyris and Schön² identified the gap between espoused theory and theory-in-use decades ago. What remains underappreciated is how consistently that gap appears in collaborative contexts specifically, and how poorly most partnership frameworks are designed to surface and close it.

The reason is straightforward. Collaborative frameworks, including many well-intentioned ones, tend to focus on structure: governance models, KPIs, escalation protocols, joint planning processes. These things matter. But structure does not change behaviour. It contains it, channels it, and sometimes constrains it. The behaviour itself - what people actually do when a shared commitment conflicts with a personal or organisational interest - is driven by something deeper: the beliefs and attitudes that are activated in the moment of decision.

This is the dimension that most partnership frameworks do not adequately address. And it is the dimension that most reliably determines whether a collaboration succeeds or fails.

What Good Actually Looks Like

McKinsey's research is not without hope. It cites examples of enterprise-model collaboration that genuinely work: relationships built not on the managed performance of partnership, but on honest recognition that each party needs the other to achieve something neither can achieve alone.

That mutual dependency, when it is real and acknowledged and structurally embedded, changes everything. It changes what leaders are willing to commit to, what they are willing to share, and how they respond when the relationship is tested. When the dependency is genuine, the behavioural commitments that follow tend to be genuine too.

When it is not, when the language of partnership is applied to what is functionally a transactional relationship, the behavioural commitments remain aspirational. And aspirational commitments, as any practitioner will tell you, have a half-life that rarely survives the first serious test.

The Standard That Addresses the Gap

ISO 44001 - the international standard for collaborative business relationships - represents the most systematic attempt to date to define what collaboration actually requires of organisations at an operational level. It provides the architecture: the processes, the governance, the relationship management disciplines that give collaboration a structural foundation.

But the standard's authors understood something important: architecture without behaviour is a building nobody uses. The relational competencies that ISO 44001 demands, trust-building, joint value creation, conflict resolution, leadership alignment, are not delivered by process alone. They require organisations and their leaders to develop capabilities that most have never been asked to demonstrate before: the ability to put a shared outcome ahead of an individual organisational interest, to remain transparent when transparency is uncomfortable, and to sustain commitment to a relationship through the inevitable moments when walking away would be easier.

That is a leadership challenge as much as a management one. And it is a challenge that requires deliberate, sustained development; not a workshop, not a governance framework, but a genuine investment in the behavioural capability that makes collaborative intent translate into collaborative practice.

The Moment Is Now

The McKinsey findings land at a moment when the case for collaboration has never been more urgent or more evidenced. Supply chains are under pressure. Defence and critical infrastructure programmes demand levels of inter-organisational integration that traditional contracting models cannot deliver. Technology ecosystems require organisations to co-invest in ways that their existing relationship frameworks were never designed to support.

The organisations that will navigate this successfully are not necessarily the largest or the best-resourced. They are the ones that have done the harder work of building genuine collaborative capability: the leadership behaviours, the shared frameworks, the relational infrastructure that allows them to move from intent to impact when it matters most.

The research tells us the prize is substantial. Over thirty years of practice tells me the path to it is clearer than most organisations think, and more demanding than most are currently prepared for.

The question is not whether to collaborate. For most organisations, that decision has already been made for them by the complexity of the environments they operate in. The question is whether to do it properly.

Howard Betts is an Associate Director at the Institute for Collaborative Working (ICW) and heads up the new ICW 'Advanced Collaborative Leader Programme'. Find out more about this two-day programme.

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¹Fernando Figueiredo, Kayla Miele, Ruben Schaubroeck, and Tobias Henz (2026) 'How corporate–scale-up partnering can boost Europe's tech competitiveness', McKinsey & Company, Insights 10th of June 2026.

²Argyris, C and Schön, D.A. (1974) Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco; Argyris, C and Schön, D.A. (1978) Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA; Argyris, C (1990) Overcoming Organizational Defences: Facilitating Organizational Learning, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Argyris, C (1991) Teaching Smart People How to Learn, Harvard Business Review, May-June 1991