Insider Activists Pursuing an Agenda for Change: Selling the Need for Collaboration

While inter-organizational collaboration concerns processes of organizing between firms, it is always initiated and enacted by individual people who perceive a need for collaboration. This chapter takes the perspective of these actors and their efforts to seek collaboration as they pursue an agenda for change. Collaboration processes are thus conceptualized as path creation and internal strategizing. The chapter focuses specifically on how actors sell the need for collaboration internally and how they draw on their external network to promote change. It illustrates this process of issue selling and collaboration with six case studies in the area of new product development, new forms of network governance, and network-wide change of business practices. Comparing these more or less successful trajectories highlights the relevance of the relational context in issue selling, the role of intentionality within emerging processes, and interplay between external collaboration and internal strategizing.