RELACIÓN ENTRE LA INVERSIÓN Y LA DEMANDA EXTERNA

Although, collaborations are usually taken to be a good thing, Asthana, Richardson and Halliday (2002) argue that it is significant to determine the conditions or factors that increase the probability of successful collaborations emerging. From literature, there is evidence to indicate that the collaboration process from the formation stage through to the evaluation stage can be a difficult journey for public and private sector partners and can often fail to live up to expectations. Partnerships should result in new services or products targeted at the public which would not have been achieved by either the public or private sector. However, a broad array of different perspectives and goals are in play as organisations from both the public and private sectors could tend to focus on individual interest and aims (Nissen, Evald and Clarke, 2013). According to Eden and Huxham, (2001, p. 374) “when social issues are the focus of the collaboration the forces against success can be particularly great, partly because of the ambiguity that surrounds the nature of social issues themselves and partly because there tend to be many organisations with some, often ill-defined, stake in the issue”.

According to Gray (1989) collaboration is “a process through which parties who see different aspects of a problem can explore their differences constructively and search

for solutions that go beyond their own limited vision of what is possible”. Himmelman (1996, p.28), defines collaboration as “exchanging information, altering

activities, sharing resources and enhancing the capacity of another for mutual benefit and to achieve a common purpose”. A collaboration process that involves partners creating new value together (Kanter, 1994). In the context of PPPs, Gray (1996) offered a framework conceptualised along two dimensions in which she classified different inter-organisational collaborations; the factors that motivate partners to collaborate and the type of outcomes expected. According to this framework, collaborations involving collective strategies on how partners can implement a shared

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vision can be labelled as partnerships, whereby through their collaborative capacity, the partners gain appreciation of their interdependence. Common practice in collaboration, however, suggests that in partnerships, the diverse organisational and individual agendas tend to make reaching agreements difficult (Berger, Cunningham, and Drumwright, 2004; Huxham and Vangen, 2004). So also partners often have to deal with challenges and signs of collaborative inertia before being able to achieve the partnership goals or initial milestones (Stadtler, 2015; Huxham and Vangen, 2004).

PPPs also might succeed in spending money, but without the potential gains of collaborative working. Unlike resource dependency theory which is concerned with examining patterns of contest, power and domination in an environment characterised by the struggle over scarce resources (Lowndes and Skelcher, 1998); collaborative theory is characterised by a concept of collaborative advantage and programme enhancement from sharing resources, risks and rewards and prioritizing of collaborative advantage rather than competitive advantage (Huxham, 1996). According to Huxham (1996, p. 15), “If collaboration is voluntary, organisations usually need to justify their involvement in it in terms of its contribution to their own objectives; on the other hand, if organisations are mandated to be part of a collaboration, getting an outcome for themselves is important in motivating them to put sufficient resources into it to make it work”. Collaborative advantage thus emphasises the need for individual organisations to achieve its objective better through collaboration than it could on its own.

Furthermore, the value of collaboration could be identified within the capacity of partners from different organisations to combine their resources and expertise in order to create and sustain successful partnership working; this notion has been termed collaborative advantage (Huxham, 1996; Kanter, 1994). Giving the high investment in resources involved in partnerships, it will often be difficult to justify collaborating except when real advantage can be gained from it. According to Huxham (1996, p. 14),

“Collaborative advantage will be achieved when something unusually creative is produced- perhaps an objective is met – that no organisation could have produced on its own and when each organisation, through the collaboration, is able to achieve its own objectives better than it could alone”.

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The emphasis of this definition is that it focuses on the need for each individual organisation to achieve its own objectives better than it could alone and from recognition that it is a necessary requirement for successful outcomes of collaboration. Apostolakis (2004) and Kanter (1994) further argue that, collaborative advantage defines a high value and ambitious form of collaboration and it is vital to the growing practice of partnerships. Collaborative advantage centres on the outputs of collaboration, thereby promoting it as a worthy activity to investment in. As emphasised by McQuaid, (1994, p.16) “depending upon the nature of the problem, partnership can greatly increase an individual organisation's effectiveness and efficiency, especially through improved co-ordination between (and within) organisations, hence creating a synergy between the various organisations”. Consequently, when partners are encountering challenges in operationalizing their strategies, Huxham (2004) states that the main values of the concept of collaborative advantage can raise the profile of collaboration and legitimise it as an activity worthy of resource investment. In other words, the concept provides a theoretical ‘guiding light’ for the purpose of local regeneration partnerships. This could be helped by partner organisations that bring together different resources and expertise to the partnership working, that in turn creates the opportunity for collaborative advantage (Huxham and Vangen, 2004; Lasker, Weiss, and Miller, 2001). This however is only a side of the coin, as argued by Vangen and Huxham (2011, p. 732), that “the achievement of collaborative advantage can be hindered by both congruence of, and diversity between, organisations goals”. Partners therefore need to engage in a continuous process of encouraging the collaboration processes within the partnership working.

Considering that collaborative advantage can maximise the value gained when collaborating, the theoretical framework which guides this research is the collaborative advantage theory. The theory of collaborative advantage is to support partners who seek to understand and capture the complexity of collaborative advantage in practice and convey it in a way that will seem real to those who experience it in their partnership process (Huxham and Vangen, 2005). This reinforces the rationale for translating the methodologies of the collaborative advantage theory into a different geographical context.

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