Collaboration Is the New Competition

A restaurant business and a car company do not make the same products, work to the same development cycles or face identical customer decisions. Yet both need to understand how people might want to live in the future. That shared question brings Michelle Gansle and Dr. Rupert Hofmann together in this Innovation Rockstars episode.

Gansle, speaking as Vice President for Global Strategic Insights at McDonald's, and Hofmann from Audi Business Innovation discuss their work through the Foresight Academy. The idea is to investigate changing human needs together, then let each company decide what those findings mean for its business.

Their conversation makes cross-industry collaboration more concrete. It addresses the research companies can share, the decisions that remain private and the work required to turn different perspectives into something useful. It also shows how personal connections can bring an unexpected partner to the table.

Begin with a question wider than the product category

Gansle describes McDonald's attention as having been concentrated largely on the next zero to three years. Part of the business also needed to look further ahead, considering changes that could affect the industry and how the company might respond or help shape them.

Hofmann approaches the same need from a different context. Products with long development cycles require teams to think about customers whose expectations may have changed by the time the product arrives.

His starting point is straightforward:

“if you take a customer-centered focus seriously, you need to do the necessary research to understand the customers of tomorrow.”

The Foresight Academy brings companies from different industries into a shared inquiry about desirable everyday life roughly a decade ahead. Instead of beginning with a particular product feature, participants explore how people may want to live and what could influence those expectations.

That wider frame gives the companies something meaningful to investigate together. A change in how people use time or relate to technology can matter to several industries, even when each will make different choices about it.

Share the investigation, keep the business decisions distinct

For Gansle, the appeal includes sharing the cost of deeper research and learning from how other participants interpret it. A company such as SAP and a company such as McDonald's may look at the same changes in human behavior and see different implications.

That difference is useful. The group can develop a broader understanding without requiring its members to arrive at one commercial answer.

Hofmann makes the boundary explicit. The work is about customer needs and changing expectations, rather than disclosing Audi's future model plans, strategic partners or other sensitive decisions. Confidentiality is addressed in the arrangements, but the shared research agenda reduces the need to enter those areas in the first place.

For R&D leaders considering collaboration, this is a practical design choice. Define a question that partners can explore openly, and distinguish that work from the product and strategy decisions each organization will make afterward. Openness becomes easier when the purpose and limits of the exchange are clear.

Treat insight as a partnership with the business

Gansle pushes back when insights teams are described as service providers serving internal clients. She sees the work as a partnership in business decisions.

“We partner with different teams to help uncover human truths to drive business strategy versus being a service provider.”

She also distinguishes the approaches used for insight and foresight. In her account, an insight project generally begins with an identified business problem. The team develops hypotheses and investigates them to support a recommendation or action.

Foresight opens a broader inquiry into how the world may change and what possibilities the business should consider. The distinction is not simply a longer date on the same research request. It changes the starting point and the way the team works.

Both perspectives matter. A business needs evidence to improve decisions already on its agenda, while also making room to discover questions it has not yet learned to ask.

Give the collaboration a working process

Hofmann describes more than an occasional exchange of presentations. Participants bring research questions together, examine hypotheses and contribute different perspectives. The work moves toward synthesis and visual material that can help communicate the findings inside their companies.

Images, stories and clips have a role in making the research understandable beyond the people who conducted it. They are the communication stage of a shared investigation, rather than a substitute for one.

The group also exchanges experience about how foresight influences management, strategy and products. Participants can learn from one another's difficulties in making research useful, as well as from the research itself.

In-person meetings help build relationships, with virtual contact supporting the work between them. Hofmann emphasizes structure alongside a willingness to be surprised. A collaboration needs enough continuity to make progress without eliminating the different perspectives that justify doing it together.

Build the relationships that bring another perspective in

McDonald's involvement began through a chain of introductions. A Foresight Academy participant from Hornbach connected Hofmann with McDonald's German marketing leadership, which led him to Gansle. Further introductions then expanded the network.

That route reflects Hofmann's preference for being a giver in a network, connecting people as well as looking for expertise he can use. Gansle brings a related appreciation of experience across cultures, describing living and working in Germany and the Netherlands as career highlights.

Neither guest presents foresight as a precise prediction. The value lies in broadening what the organization can notice and discuss before it chooses a direction. The companies remain responsible for their own choices, but they do not have to investigate every change in human life alone.