Non-equity Strategic Alliance

Love Woof and Meow plans to create non-equity strategic alliances, that two or more companies sign a contractual relationship to pool their resources and capabilities together.

Each participating organization preserves its independence and autonomy in this strategic alliance, remaining an individual entity while working toward shared objectives. Organizations may choose to establish a strategic alliance to break into a new market segment, expand their customer base, gain a competitive advantage, improve product offerings and grow business.

Portfolios

Having understood the benefits of creating alliances, Love Woof and Meow is interested in sustaining the benefits for long periods of time and build portfolios that will gain ground, as also be centrally managed.

In effect, portfolio management is all about extracting best practices from alliance experiences and then spreading these internally. In this process established agreements with independent companies grows the knowledge that flows to specific functions.

Co-creation

Co-creation is a strategy that Love Woof and Meow plans to develop. Is a form of collaborative innovation: ideas are shared and improved together, rather than kept to oneself. A strategy that brings together multiple parties to jointly produce a mutually valued outcome from beginning to end.

Co-Branding

Love Woof and Meow targets also Co-Branding practices. Co-branding is a strategic marketing and advertising partnership between two brands wherein the success of one brand brings success to its partner brand, too. Co-branding can be an effective way to build business, boost awareness, and break into new markets, and for a partnership to truly work, it has to be a win-win for all participants.

Collaboration Agreements

A collaboration agreement is a legally binding agreement between different parties that want to co-operate together or work collaboratively on a project that sets out how the parties will work together, divides the benefits, responsibilities and obligations created by or for the project between the parties, as well as setting out what happens if the parties cannot agree or want to stop collaborating on the project and to terminate the agreement.

A collaboration agreement for Love Woof and Meow needs to include detailed provisions relating to intellectual property, and it will depend on the nature of the project and the intellectual property that is used or created during the term of the project. There are many types of intellectual property, including copyrights, trademarks, design rights and patents. The parties should include provisions that protect any intellectual property rights that are owned or created by them, before they enter into the collaboration. Agreements often include specific provisions stating that ownership of this type of ‘background’ intellectual property, remains with the party that created and owns it. The parties will need to decide how the created intellectual property rights during the course of the project will be treated – whether they will considered to be jointly owned or whether one party will own the intellectual property and grant the other party or parties to the collaboration a licence to use the intellectual property for the purposes of performing the project.

Data Protection

There are obligations on businesses to adequately protect any information that it has been collected, uses, stores or processes that might allow an individual to be identified and all the parties to the collaboration need to make sure that they have got systems and processes in place that enable any transfers of this data to be monitored and protected. Any projects in which this personal data may be shared, used, stored or transferred should include comprehensive data protection provisions in the collaboration agreement to make sure that all parties are compliant with the updated data protection.