New Research Reveals Collaboration Is a Key Driver of Business Performance Around the World

New Research Reveals Collaboration Is a Key Driver of Business Performance Around the World

Collaboration is a key driver of overall performance of companies around the world. Its impact is twice as significant as a company’s aggressiveness in pursuing new market opportunities (strategic orientation) and five times as significant as the external market environment (market turbulence).*

Those are the results of a groundbreaking study – “Meetings Around the World: The Impact of Collaboration on Business Performance” — conducted by Frost & Sullivan and sponsored by Verizon Business and Microsoft Corp. The study defines collaboration as an interaction between culture and technology such as audio and Web conferencing, e-mail and instant messaging, and it created a method to specifically measure how collaboration affects business performance.

The study also showed that a global culture of collaboration exists, but that there are regional differences in how people in various countries prefer to communicate with one another. “The results show that collaboration can positively impact each of the gold standards of performance — profitability, profit growth and sales growth — to determine a company’s overall performance in the marketplace,” said Jaclyn Kostner, Ph.D., best-selling author and expert on high-performance virtual collaboration. “As a general rule, global companies that collaborate better, perform better. Those that collaborate less, do not perform as well. It’s just that simple.”

The “Meetings Around the World” study surveyed 946 information technology and line-of-business decision-makers from a cross section of 2,000 small-to-medium, mid-market and global companies in the United States, Europe (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) and Asia-Pacific (Australia, Hong Kong and Japan).

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