Strategic partnerships between ICOs and business are receiving an increased attention from the market. For businesses, it is a way of reaching their goals and gaining the competitive advantage over other ICOs and business. While for the market it shows proof of concept and faster market adoption. ICOs are interested in strategic partnerships because they have started to see that collaboration between the sectors can bring added value that would not be possible to accomplish independently. By combining strengths and resources and by pursuing common goals, strategic partnerships enable partners to exploit each other's differences for mutual benefits.

“2018 will be the age of ICO alliances. In this age, the collaboration will grow in frequency and strategic importance. “ - Audrius Vrubliauskas CEO of Birdchain

Strategic partnerships have the possibility to tackle challenges and opportunities that could not have been handled in the same way internally. By joining forces with other ICO’s or private sector ICO’s can access valuable solutions, exposure to resources that can contribute in fulfilling their own missions. This creates a possibility for dealing with global challenges both efficiently and effectively.

ICO’s cannot escape the impact of core development problems - they to need a safe and stable environment in which to operate and grow. There is growing recognition of these shared problems, prompting innovative approaches to find shared solutions. Global challenges are too complex for any one sector to address or solve alone and there is a growing awareness of partnerships between ICOs, private sector and even civic sector.

“The emerging interest in strategic partnerships can be attributed to the realization that strategic partnering can promote effective results for all concerned: businesses, ICOs, Governments and especially the society/community” - Audrius Vrubliauskas.

Businesses are becoming aware of not only the dangers and risks that lie ahead for their own organizations survival but also the potential opportunities and benefits that could be achieved by cooperation rather than confrontation between different projects.

Types of Partnerships

Reciprocal exchange:

An exchange that involves partnerships where the relationship between partners is based on an exchange of resources for a specific activity.

Independent Value Creation:

Indicates that both parties have individual goals, but work together in order to create desired value. An example is a partnership in which a company donates their employees working hours and technical expertise.

Strategic Partnerships:

Partners work together strategically on the same problem which they would both like to see resolved. Such ventures create a much more dependent relationship between the partners and value is created through the mutually dependent exchange of ideas, resources and efforts.

Partnership development stages

Current ICO partnership problems

While ICO market is growing new ways to attract the market attention are being invented and thought off. It is important to note that partnerships were not an exception to this.



*Actual ICO partnership development outlook.

Promoting and creating awareness that one ICO or another has signed a partnership with one or another prominent company could an usually does provide a much-needed market exposure. In some cases to the extremes that the masses without doing any research contributes to the project development even if the project has no merit, poor team, or in general is a scam.

It is important to note that majority of the partnerships is also in no way a real partnership described in the previous subtopic. These partnerships add no value to the project development nor to the future services provided by the team. At most it can be described as the most basic form of collaboration between businesses. This type of partnerships involves usually only partnership in “name” without any mutual benefits besides misleading the market.

Conclusion

Real strategic partnerships between ICOs and private businesses are rare and yet to be fully explored. ICOs that engage in real partnerships provides a more sustainable practice and future product and service development. ICOs that collaborate strategically with businesses do it because they believe companies can contribute to the overall product or service success and not a short-term gain.