At a recent Cambridge Network event featuring Cambridge Enterprise, I was reminded how deeply human the commercialisation process is. Alongside the technical, legal and financial arrangements, how people work together determines whether an agreement delivers its promise. Bringing the collaboration to life needs trust, shared understanding, personal compromise, and a good slug of grit. When you have spent years developing an idea, involving others can mean sharing influence over something you care deeply about.
The value of intellectual property can depend on things that are hard to pin down: know-how shared through conversation, an understanding of why a decision was made, confidence in a partner’s judgement and a willingness to keep contributing. Not all of this needs to qualify as an asset on a balance sheet for its loss to matter.
But that human value can slip away. As the work continues to unfold, priorities change, people move on and assumptions go untested. The work can drift from what people thought they had agreed, without anyone explicitly discussing the change.
Here are five clues to look out for that you might be eroding value:
- People leave meetings with different interpretations, uncertain commitment or unspoken reservations. Nobody is clear about accountability for the next step.
- Smart people stay quiet at the wrong moment because speaking up feels too costly. Avoidable mistakes go unchallenged, creating more rework.
- Everyone is busy and well-intentioned but key knowledge and useful insight can be lost. Decision making is compromised.
- Instead of improving the work, disagreement creates defensiveness or politics. You end up with apparent agreement in the room and unresolved differences outside it.
- Clients and partners feel the internal confusion through mixed messages or missed follow-through. This weakens confidence and puts future opportunities at risk.
These are not simply signs that people need to get on better. They put the collaboration’s knowledge, momentum and capacity to deliver at risk.
Six questions to keep asking as the collaboration develops:
- Are we clear about what we are trying to achieve together?
- What can we reliably expect from one another?
- How do we share knowledge, use different perspectives and work through disagreement?
- Who has authority to decide, whose voice is heard and how do we influence others responsibly?
- What do people need to contribute honestly and work sustainably?
- How will we turn these agreements into everyday action?
Always be contracting around these human aspects: keep checking expectations, responsibilities and commitments as the work develops. Build these questions into your regular reviews, rather than saving them for when something has gone wrong.
Signing a contract is a milestone. Alongside protecting intellectual property, collaborators need to sustain the human relationships that help turn that IP into practical value.
At Talent Glue, we help teams make sense of the friction in how they work together and agree practical ways forward.
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