The Partnership Blind Spot: Why Going It Alone Holds Back Your Growth Potential
- Frederic Etiemble
- May 29
- 7 min read
At the beginning of the 21st century, it was common knowledge that around 50% of partnerships failed to deliver their expected value, and could even destroy value for both partners. It’s no surprise then, that many executive teams preferred to keep things in their own hands and avoid investing time and energy into partnerships or alliances as an avenue for growth.
Yet, things have started to change in the last decade with the rise of ecosystems. Venkat Atluri and Miklós Dietz, authors of The Ecosystem Economy, project that “one-third of global GDP will soon come from ecosystems, or networks of organisations across different sectors.” Success will reward those who can pursue partnerships deliberately, with the right capabilities and strategic clarity. In this emerging business reality, partnerships have become one of the most promising, if underdeveloped, capabilities for unlocking growth.
This article is part of our series, Where Are Your Growth Blind Spots?, where we explore often-overlooked barriers to sustainable growth. Drawing from Vibrance’s Growth Orienteering approach, we aim to help leaders uncover hidden obstacles and unlock their organisation’s full potential.
In this instalment, we examine the Partnership Blind Spot, a limitation to growth that arises when companies overlook or underutilise alliances and subsequently fail to unlock the latent value in their ecosystem.
The Partnership Blind Spot
What do we mean by an ecosystem?
In business, an ecosystem is a deliberately shaped community of diverse actors - companies, customers, public bodies, NGOs, even citizens - who combine their distinct assets to solve a larger societal need and create more value together than any single entity could alone.
Seen through that lens, partnerships are the building-blocks of ecosystem advantage. Yet to seize the growth potential ecosystems offer, many organisations must first overcome long-standing issues that have made partnering elusive:
1. Awareness – Many organisations fail to see the broader value that true co-creation or ecosystem thinking can provide.
2. Transactional Mindset – They lump “partners” in with regular suppliers, viewing them narrowly and missing the deeper potential for collaboration in innovation and growth.
3. Governance and Control – Existing governance frameworks can make multi-partner decision-making cumbersome and painfully slow.
4. Short-Term Thinking – Under pressure for quick wins, leaders may not give partnerships the time they need to bear fruit.
This list is obviously non-exhaustive. Partnerships can falter for a wide range of reasons, often feeding into each other and reinforcing a limited, transactional approach.
As a result, the Partnership Blind Spot is widespread in today’s business world and can be recognised when organisations:
• Operate independently, without leveraging ecosystems for growth.
• Don’t differentiate between suppliers and genuine co-innovation partners.
• Have no clear strategy or framework for alliances that enhance market reach or innovation efforts.
Approach: Three Steps to Better Partnerships
To succeed in driving higher value from partnerships, leaders need a way to visualise how partnerships and ecosystems might create new growth opportunities. And they require a language to discuss these opportunities, both internally and externally. At Vibrance, we typically follow the three-step approach described below to gradually open the aperture when we help our clients identify, debate, and act on growth opportunities in the “Partner” vertical of the Growth Map.
Step 1: Deepen the Relationships You Already Have
Most companies start their partnering journey with a collection of short-term, largely transactional deals. Turning those connections into genuine growth engines means shifting from transactions to relationships, from “you sell, we buy” to “we succeed together over time.”
Look at Philips Healthcare. Instead of merely supplying medical equipment like MRI scanners to hospitals, Philips now signs fifteen-year partnership contracts that bundle equipment, data analytics, workflow redesign and staff training. The hospital gains continuous upgrades and help in reshaping its business model while Philips secures a long-horizon revenue stream and deep insight into clinical needs. In such a partnership, both sides become co-architects of the future of healthcare delivery.
Ask yourself: Which of your current partners could we invite into a longer, more integrated journey, one that helps both sides weather shocks and delivers better customer outcomes?
Step 2: Explore New Partnerships That Let You Scale
The next move is to scout for new key partners that can scale your business model in ways you could never manage alone.
In The Invincible Company we codified the “Scalers” patterns: a series of approaches to extend reach, capacity or capability at speed.
"Scalers" pattern in Strategyzer The Invincible Company
Think Spotify integrating with every smart speaker brand. Spotify’s growth team realised that no amount of marketing spend could match the reach of the voice-assistant boom. So, instead of wasting precious marketing money, it developed the Spotify Connect SDK, a small software library that lets a device log a user in, stream music straight from Spotify’s cloud, and obey basic commands (“play”, “skip”, voice requests). This SDK lets every major speaker brand - from Amazon Echo and Google Nest to Samsung’s Family Hub refrigerators - “speak Spotify” out of the box. By 2024 the protocol, Spotify Connect, ran on 300-plus devices across 80+ brands and could be invoked by simple voice commands (“Alexa, play my Discover Weekly”). Overnight, Spotify leapt from the phone in your pocket to the centre of the home and the dashboard of the car.
Scaling was achieved by leveraging third-party assets (speakers), an expansion of reach and usage occasions that would have taken years, and billions, to replicate alone.
Ask yourself: What new partner could make our business model more scalable (e.g. by eliminating resource and activity bottlenecks)?
Step 3: Weave Individual Partnerships into a Coherent Ecosystem
Dietz calls the ongoing rise of ecosystems “the single largest economic transformation in the history of the planet.” Seizing this opportunity will require organisations to use a new business playbook, and no one has done more work to codify the new language and mindset required than Greg Bernarda, creator of the Upruption movement.
The body of knowledge created by Bernarda on ecosystems provides the awareness and vocabulary to navigate conversations on value creation through ecosystems. In essence, the inspiration provided by Bernarda’s thinking on ecosystems introduced below enables leaders to think more broadly about strategic partnerships in their context.
Bernarda observes that effective ecosystem leaders behave less like traditional CEOs and more like the “mayor” of a city. This is shown through five shifts in their leadership.
Ecosystem leaders embrace a societal vision.
So, to weave partnerships into a coherent ecosystem, ask yourself: what vision for our future would be big enough to welcome partners into it?
Ecosystem leaders redraw boundaries with unusual partners.
Ask yourself: what “unusual partners” would we need around the table to discuss the next evolution of our ecosystem?
Ecosystem leaders take care of the infrastructure.
Ask yourself: what missing piece of infrastructure would we need to take responsibility for to create a new level of value creation in our ecosystem?
Ecosystem leaders optimise collective performance.
Ask yourself: what would success look like, not only for us, but also for key partners involved in our ecosystem?
Ecosystem leaders help others make the transition.
Ask yourself: what should we do to help key partners transition to the next evolution of our ecosystem?
In Bernarda’s words, “the real promise of ecosystems is in lifting the game to the next level. One that functions better and generates new and better value for all involved.” Helping leaders see partnerships from this vantage point completely changes the nature of the conversation we have on partnerships and how they can be leveraged to create more and better value.
I won’t be able to do justice to the depth of Bernarda’s thinking on ecosystems here so I invite you to go to upruption.com for more details and/or watch the keynote “Beyond business model innovation: how to engage your ecosystem & unlock up-ruption" that Bernarda delivered at our Corporate Innovation in Action conference in Melbourne.
Case Study: Unilever and Project Shakti
Unilever, a global consumer-goods giant, sought ways to reach rural communities in India that appeared almost unreachable through traditional distribution. Rather than persisting with conventional supply chains, the company embraced a broader societal vision of uplifting these underserved markets, forging alliances with local women entrepreneurs, NGOs, and microfinance institutions. In doing so, Unilever effectively redrew the usual industry boundaries, tapping into partners well outside its typical network of distributors.
Recognising that standard infrastructure did not exist in remote villages, Unilever worked directly with these women to establish the foundations they needed, offering practical training, basic merchandising support, and even simple business tools. By leaning on NGOs and microfinance organisations, the company overcame barriers to entry, such as limited financial resources or a lack of formal business expertise. Unilever also approached the relationship as a genuine collaboration rather than a top-down programme, frequently refining the model to ensure everyone benefited. This outward focus meant equipping the women not just with product stock but with the confidence and skills to run their own micro-enterprises. As a result, they became contributors to an evolving ecosystem, rather than mere recipients of corporate outreach. Over time, the women’s growing competence reinforced the distribution network and helped Unilever maintain a steady flow of products to rural customers who had long been overlooked by conventional retail.
Impact on Growth
By forging these unconventional partnerships and investing in the capabilities of local entrepreneurs, Unilever dramatically expanded its presence in underserved areas while building strong brand loyalty. Critically, Project Shakti became a repeatable model: Unilever adapted the same principles - combining social empowerment with commercial goals - in other emerging markets, broadening its reach and demonstrating resilience against strong competition. No longer treated as a small experimental initiative, these partnerships evolved into a central growth lever, proving that aligning a societal vision with an ecosystem of stakeholders can unlock significant and sustainable business opportunities.
Overcoming the Partnership Blind Spot
Growth, increasingly, will reward those who can collaborate across traditional boundaries. As Greg Bernarda’s ecosystem thinking shows, partnering to unlock higher value creation requires embracing a societal vision that others can join, redrawing boundaries with unusual partners, taking care of the missing infrastructure, optimising for collective performance and helping other make the transition to the next evolution of your ecosystem.
When organisations adopt this new type of partnership mindset, they release themselves from the conventional supplier-buyer constrained thinking and begin to foster collaboration in ways that benefit many players at once. Even if there’s no denying that it is slower and more complex to orchestrate an ecosystem, over time, this shift yields significantly more durable and transformative results than short-term deals or internal initiatives alone could achieve.
So, as you prepare to design your next growth strategy, ask yourself:
With a true partnership capability in our organisation, which partners - and which ecosystems - could unlock our next evolution and growth?
About Fred
Executive advisor on strategy and innovation. Co-author of The Invincible Company, a guide to building resilience in organisations through corporate innovation. The book was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2021.
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