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Editorial: partnerships--whether to ride the wave to success or to slowly sink and perhaps be lost?

When we collaborate, we leverage the capabilities of all the partners. Teamwork has many advantages to improve the quality of an activity such as a research program or the new educational program. Teamwork often increases the likelihood or magnitude of funding of a grant or contract. The advantage of assembling a team or developing a partnership is to bring together different perspectives, disciplines, and expertise. In other words, a successful team is more than the sum of its parts, with each member bringing different contacts from industry, academia, and government. A multi-disciplinary or even multi-institutional team is advantageous for research (discussed previously in Scanes, 2009) as a diverse team can access more and different potential sources of funding for projects. To be successful, the team must demonstrate its cohesiveness and have a proven record of successful collaboration. There are potential disadvantages of working as a team. Different disciplines employ different terminology—almost a different language. We need to understand the differences and learn to communicate in very different ways. In a team, we lose absolute control of a research project. The corollary, however, is that responsibility for all aspects of the project is shared with all members of the team. This is a critically important lesson when submitting a manuscript by a team to a journal. As a researcher, I have been delighted to be a member of teams and other long-term collaborative arrangements. As an administrator, I have seen (and been part of) the successes when strategic partnerships of departments, colleges, and different universities come forward with a common or consensus proposal for a new program or initiative. The initiative should benefit the participants but may involve doing things in a different way. Such collaborative initiatives bring together campus opinion leaders and industry/community supporters. These initiatives must be based on “good science” and the likelihood of their success is high. I confess that, when I was department chair, even though we developed new programs and recruited new people, we did not partner sufficiently with other departments in the college. The fear was that other departments would get our slice of the pie, or that they did not respect us, or even that they were not as deserving as we were. Sometimes it was “animal versus plant.” In other places or times, it was and still is “poultry versus livestock or pigs or sheep.” It is easy to see that this way of thinking does not lead to progress. I learned a valuable lesson—that many of our stakeholders care little for the individual department (be it animal or poultry science, food science, or agricultural economics) but rather are looking for the quality of service and programs that we can offer. Developing partnerships takes time and commitment. Even when we have developed a partnership, there is often room to take it to the next level as a strategic partnership. This is not always comfortable as we have to try new ways of doing things and naysayers will point to all the reasons why a collaborative venture won’t work or say that we tried it in 1975 and it didn’t work then. I put forward the challenge, where can we develop partnerships? How can we strengthen existing collaborations? Can we turn long-term interactions into strategic alliances?