Table 3 Discourse in the brainstorming phase

Financial capital

“The project is a high risk project. We’ve been fighting this battle for a while so, if the project cannot get the critical mass of adoption of users and of providers in the beginning of the project it will be hard for the project to continue or exist as a collaboration model.…there needs to be an economic incentive for partners.”

“There is quite little money nowadays in the high technology based testing business. During this project we should be able to develop the tools to increase the whole business ecosystem, and when there is something to share companies will more willing join.”

“We need to clearly communicate the benefits to the industry, because we say the industry should finance a large part of it. We are not there yet, we don’t have clear communication.”

“The measure for the success of the collaboration model is at the end, if it succeeds to be economically viable then this means that the collaboration model must be doing some right. If this does not succeed in the long term, if partners start to pull out, then we did something wrong.”

Human capital

“…if it comes to the point of bringing this to the market you have to involve more people with experience and marketing. Otherwise it’s a problem you cannot ask people sitting in their labs each day to come up with some clever marketing strategies; it’s not just their job to think of so that’s why they don’t expect it.”

Social capital

“We should have tight connections inside the project first, so we can show the use case and real business case inside the project it’s then easier to make it interesting for external partners.”

“The collaboration model might be the center point to keep these contacts alive.”

“Some partners are regularly in contact, not necessary daily but at least weekly, while some partners are silent and less active.”

“…talk to them potential partners, face to face, know them, otherwise you cannot get them to commit.”

“Trust that’s the most important thing. You gain trust and after that everything is easy.”

“Trust it’s about playing golf with the right people and explaining to them why it’s useful to join the collaboration and useful is just commercial interests. If you cannot earn anything on the platform it’s not useful. It would be useful if we could understand the real motivation of the partners.”

“From a technical or social point of view, it really needs to be a tightly integrated team where there are actually incentives for all partners.”

“Organizations do not do business alone. People do business, people have relationships, and trust. Trust is an important factor. But I’m quite sure that building this kind of society around this testing business helps to know people and increases trust. If people trust each other the organizations will more or less do the same.”

Innovation capital

“We can bring in our ideas and we can at the same time see what the others have been thinking of this same issue, this is an exchange of ideas. Exchange of resources is difficult, every partner tries to utilize their own resources best possible way, and that’s natural, it’s acceptable.”

“We want technological exchange…started to think about the business model, it’s under development… and nowadays we are only thinking about the technical problems… we are not thinking right now on the business.”

“There are of course technological risk, management also, the technology is a high risk.”

“Trust has many dimensions, I don’t know if it’s true that the system that will be developed will be secure and natural, people will feel comfortable enough to use it. If companies feel that there may be leakage of information to somebody else that will definitely significantly disable the sustainability. Companies that are dependent on a very specific technology, like one patent, will be very skeptical if they do not get the guarantees they want from the trust point of view or because of industrial espionage and so on. But I assume that the technology is secure at a certain level where many of these problems can be handled. I think that it should not create a problem.”