By: Connie Etemadi
For those who answer the call of entrepreneurship, competition is often an incentive rather than a drawback. Still, even with the thrill of a win on the line, there are many ways the entrepreneurial journey is rewarding. For founder and SEEDSPARK® CoLAB architect Chad T. Jenkins, truly successful entrepreneurship is about collaborative winning, rather than a zero-sum game.
The vision Jenkins espouses recognizes that businesses may find greater opportunities through collaboration among entrepreneurs and the combination of ideas, talent, and resources. Rather than competing with one another, entrepreneurs can and should work together to generate better ideas. To Jenkins, collaboration is far from a new notion. Instead, he believes it is the default setting business owners should consider in their approach.
An Economy of Ideas
From the outset, many business models appear to revolve around tasks, who does what, an individual’s contribution, and measuring how these individuals compare with one another. A scarcity mindset is fostered in these environments, leading to an increased focus on competition rather than collaboration.
By contrast, the Idea Economy™ seeks to synthesize these diverse abilities and concepts, driving growth. With a shared vision of value-building through ideas, tasks, and output, the emphasis is on collaboration rather than on individual contributions alone.
How Combining Strengths Shapes Collaborative Growth Strategies
When business owners start to see stagnancy in their organization, it is often due to single-variable growth hitting a plateau. Isolated individuals without support eventually hit a natural limit of output, and worse still, burnout.
To encourage broader growth, business leaders must look at how employee strengths can complement one another. This is the underlying concept of the Code to Collaboration™. By aligning divergent talents and encouraging them to intersect and dovetail, business owners can find new pathways for development.
Jenkins says this process relies heavily on Dean Jackson’s Vision Capability Reach (VCR) Formula. It starts with vision, which tells teams and leaders where to move. Capability follows, where leaders can identify what their teams can deliver. Finally, business leaders can broaden their effect by determining their reach. The VCR Formula can help entrepreneurs understand where their growth may be stymied and where hidden opportunities exist through collaboration.
Inside the IC³ Method
The Code to Collaboration also implements the IC³ Method, the process of collecting the resources that naturally surround each person and combining them to create a shift toward a more collaborative entrepreneurial environment. IC3 allows ideas that could never be realized in isolation to emerge.
Moving toward a collaborative model may cause some dissonance, but for Jenkins, this is encouraged as part of an important mindset shift. Friction can show business leaders where collaboration is needed, and Jenkins encourages entrepreneurs to use Friction Fuel to spark more conversations and collaboration. The Just Add a Zero™ mindset emphasizes working smarter rather than working harder.
CoLAB Theory into Practice
The SEEDSPARK CoLAB serves as a community space for collaboration-driven growth. Hundreds of growth partnerships across the U.S. have been developed in the lab, with Jenkins himself founding or co-founding over 40 organizations. Through a growing international network of entrepreneurs and strategic collaborations, new ventures are being created by combining Vision, Capability, and Reach.
As a collaboration architect and creator of growth frameworks, Chad T. Jenkins sees opportunity wherever friction exists. From an early age, he learned to connect people, ideas, tools, and untapped assets in ways others overlooked, creating new value through unconventional combinations.
CoLAB exists to help entrepreneurs identify and apply what they already have. Many entrepreneurs sense there is something greater inside them, such as more vision, more impact, more alignment, more possibility, yet remain trapped in models built for linear growth.
The CoLAB movement helps entrepreneurs identify hidden opportunities, align their Vision, Capability, and Reach, and build greater value through collaboration.
The future will belong to those who can recognize hidden value, combine what already exists, and create what could never be built alone.
Fortunately, business leaders looking to grow in the upcoming year can find these frameworks highly accessible, even without setting foot in the lab. For those curious about collaboration, readers can access The Code to Collaboration wherever they are, lab coat optional.
