The Reciprocity Advantage: A New Way to Partner for Innovation and Growth

According to Bob Johansen and Karl Ronn, the new way to succeed is to give what you have away. They call it the reciprocity advantage: sharing your assets with carefully chosen partners in order to learn how to make money in new ways - think give to grow.Johansen and Ronn explain each of the four steps involved in achieving reciprocity advantage, beginning with uncovering your "right-of-way": the space, resources, or technologies you control and have trust and permission to share with others. The next step is choosing the best partners to share these assets with, which can be surprising - for example, the authors tell how Microsoft partnered with the people who'd been hacking their Kinnect platform to find new uses for it. Then the authors explain how to experiment with your partners to figure out which new products or services might be scalable, and how to look at new technologies that can make scaling up faster than ever.Johansen and Ronn also identify four future forces that will dramatically impact each of these four steps, and include numerous examples of businesses that have succeeded by applying reciprocity principles as well as those that failed by sticking to shortsighted business practices. And they provide detailed, practical guidance for any business that wants to discover its own reciprocity advantage.