That was the question at the Designer Breakfast on Thursday October 18 2007. Our expert panel included author and business development consultant, Kevin Duncan, Charlie Hoult of CEO of Loewy, Maxine Horn, chief executive of British Design Innovation and Lesley Morris, the skills supremo at the Design Council. Designer Breakfaster and brand consultant Mark Wing facilitated.

So what was the answer? Billed as an exploration of collaboration, the event pitted our panel members against each other and asked them to define their own take on the subject.

Charlie Hoult (pictured above) claimed to have built his business around collaboration, He said: “Lots of clients want more scope and breadth. They feel more comfortable giving you bigger jobs."

He admits that it can be difficult for clients to ‘get’ the advantages and says that Loewy is currently trying to ‘productise’ its collaborative offer. One innovation is a ‘Brand Council’ – a kind of ‘Dragons Den’ in which the company pitches ideas to clients.

Maxine Horn’s platform is not a million miles away. She’s another keen collaborator whose business, British Design Innovation (BDI), is built around the concept. She has developed ideas such as the Innovation Bank. This brings designers with marketable ideas together with dealmakers, fund managers and technoglogists. It gives everyone the opportunity to collaborate with individuals and organisations they’d be unlikely to meet under their own banner. And, crucially, it protects designers’ IP at every stage.

Lesley Morris claimed to have come as an observer, pointing out that the next generation of designers would come through with collaboration hard-wired into their thinking. “Students now participate in multi-disciplinary teams as part of their education,” she said. She also found time to bang the drum for the Design Council’s collaborative platform - a professional services framework which will provide an open source platform for the industry and key bodies like the Design Business Association and Chartered Society of Designers.

The wild card was Kevin Duncan, author of business books and a design agency non-exec. He took a more provocative stance, saying he couldn’t understand why collaboration had become such a hot topic. Claiming that organisations didn’t exist to make profits, but to provide people with places to socialise, he thought people needed to better understand why they worked. Instead of collaborating, he claimed most of us would be better off compartmentalising our lives – working alone on a defined project, then using the remaining time to socialise.

While it was agreed that there were no hard and fast rules about what made for successful collaboration, Maxine Horn said that it needed ‘a purpose and the right mix of people.’ Egos and conflict over money were collaboration-killers.

The conclusions? It seems collaboration works best when it has a framework for bringing ideas and people together, whether it’s an in-house platform such as Charlie Hoult’s, an official one such as the Design Council’s or a commercial one like the BDI’s.

On ideas, the last word is Maxine Horn’s. She said: “The fees for services model is dying out. Think about propositions into profits instead".

All photos Damian Walker (www.damianwalker.com)