One of the characteristics of high-tech B2B/B2G companies is that they have to combine a very technical “dominant culture” (often also very financial and sometimes very “project”) with other cultures carried by different specialists. In practice, this means getting purely technical teams to cooperate with other teams with different specialities (e.g. legal) or closer to the markets and customers (marketing, sales, business development), all in the service of the same objectives of successful product markets in the face of competition. Whether or not one accepts the current notion of “corporate DNA” or whether one prefers to use the terms “culture” and “management” derived from history, it is certain that the management of technology companies is characterised by a highly technical culture and “mental wiring” and that this culture will have to co-operate with many internal and external players if it is not to run into serious difficulties with regard to product markets and competition.

Not all the necessary cooperation will necessarily be self-evident, as the views of different individuals, all perfectly willing, on what is good for a product, the customers or the market may be spontaneously distant. Examples include technical-marketing, sales-marketing and sales-legal cooperation, which are classic examples.

Many of these cooperations concern the “sinews of war” which are (along with cash, of course) the products and offers in the technological company. In any technological company, there is therefore a strong need for cooperation between the technical sphere and the marketing and sales sphere, particularly but not exclusively around products and offers. In addition, other players specialising in a particular field will frequently have to intervene, such as legal, purchasing, services, Ecodesign, product responsibility, etc. These different forms of cooperation and the associated arbitration will have to be organised or else the necessary cooperation will turn into a pitched battle to see who is right and who must win the decision and the budgets.

In addition to these issues of cooperation around products, there are also issues of cooperation with external partners such as research laboratories, technological start-ups, customers for the joint development of products, etc. Sometimes, depending on the size of the company, cooperation with subsidiaries, countries, partner networks, etc. will be added. 

This section explores and illustrates, within the B2B/B2G high-tech company, the issues and modalities of the main cooperations around the success of product markets.