I recently attended an MPA talk/discussion titled Creative and Digital Manchester: 'A Collaboration Conundrum'. The talk was interesting. It got quite heated at times, with a lot of passionate opinions being thrown around from the audience towards the panel of experts.
It seems that Manchester has pretty much everything in place for collaborations to happen within the creative and digital sector. We have a rich creative and digital industry that is growing at an exponential rate. And we have an abundance of co-working spaces, coffee shops and meeting rooms to host exciting collaborative meetings. My personal favourites are Foundation Coffee (their wifi is good and I like their coffee and green tea) and Zifferblat (they have unlimited cake and cereal).
A few issues that are holding back the collaboration:
- Creatives and agencies are scared of sharing their clients or projects, mainly through fear of others stealing work from them.
- Knowledge and processes are being closely guarded. Again, mainly through fear.
- Selfishness. At the end of the day, we're all driven to succeed and make money. It's human nature and it's the nature of business.
Some positives that I took from the talk:
- Business Growth Hub are in the process of setting up an online system to allow startups and SMEs to post projects and collaboration opportunities. This could be the catalyst that brings the startup community together.
- Even the big players in Manchester can seem willing to collaborate. Mark Varley, Managing Partner of Havas Media Manchester stated in the talk that "I want to collaborate. Come and see me after the talk and we'll collaborate".
As a partner of a startup company we thrive on collaboration and partnership. We're good at what we do at Pine but we don't have every single creative skill covered. We recently partnered up with 603 Copywriting to collaborate on web and print based projects. Andrew at 603 Copywriting is so skilled at his craft. He has a talent that we could never match. And he can't do graphic design. So our partnership is simple and logical. We work really well together, we're efficient and most of all we produce great work for clients. And guess what? We both benefit from the relationship.
Collaborations need to be beneficial for all parties involved. Whether that be monetary, exposure or kudos based or simply to gain good karma.
So come on Manchester, let's collaborate.
Chris Seed - Partner at Pine
