The Leadership Skill That Takes Breakthrough Technology Further

Mary Barra, Chair and CEO of General Motors, once said, “Of course we’re going to compete, but in a lot of spaces now, in many industries, you compete and you partner.”

This captures an important shift in leadership. From automotive and AI to healthcare, energy, food and biotech, companies are developing technologies that can transform established industries. But creating the breakthrough is only one part of the challenge. The next is bringing it into a world where decades of expertise, infrastructure and relationships already exist.

At Celleste Bio, we are living that journey. We have developed a new way to produce REAL cocoa ingredients using cell-culture technology, including chocolate-grade cocoa butter that we have already used to create milk chocolate. We are bringing a new capability into an industry with tremendous expertise and knowledge of its own.

I’ve learned that breakthrough technology and collaboration are not opposites. You can be deeply confident in what your company has built while recognizing that the right partnerships can help take it further. For me, knowing how and when to collaborate has become an important part of leadership.

1. Know what must be yours and where partnership adds value

A good partnership starts with clarity about what makes your company exceptional. Your core technology, intellectual property and competitive advantage need to remain clearly yours. You need to know where your company must lead and continue investing in those capabilities. But being exceptional at your core doesn’t mean every capability around your innovation needs to be built inside your organization.

When new technology enters an established industry, it meets knowledge and experience that may have been built over decades. There can be enormous value in bringing those worlds together.

The question I ask is simple: Where do we create unique value, and where could another organization’s expertise multiply it? The strongest collaborations begin with clarity about what each side uniquely brings. You are not looking for someone else to complete your innovation. You are looking at how different strengths can create greater value together.

For me, the strongest partnerships don’t compensate for what a company lacks. They multiply what it already does exceptionally well.

2. Choose partners for what you can unlock together

There is a temptation in business to evaluate partnerships by the name on the other side. A major corporation, respected institution or recognizable logo can create credibility, but credibility alone isn’t a strategy.

A better starting point is the problem or opportunity itself. What are we trying to accomplish? What could move us faster? What could become possible if we bring the right capabilities together?

This is one of the things I value about Celleste’s participation in COCO-AI, a €6.3 million Horizon Europe consortium bringing together companies and research institutions around AI-powered plant cell culture technologies. Different participants bring different areas of expertise and approaches to a shared challenge, while each continues developing its own capabilities and objectives.

Instead of asking, “Who would be a great partner for us?” I believe leaders should ask, “What could we make possible together?” That small change in perspective can lead to very different partnerships.

And this isn’t unique to cocoa. Whether you lead a company in AI, healthcare, energy, biotech or manufacturing, there will be moments when your innovation intersects with expertise that already exists elsewhere. The opportunity is not simply to gain access to that expertise. It is to discover what the combination of capabilities can unlock.

3. The best partners make each other smarter

One of the things I have learned to appreciate most is a difficult question. When you have spent years developing a technology, you naturally know it deeply. Your team has challenged assumptions, solved problems and accumulated knowledge that very few people outside the company possess. That expertise is part of your advantage.

But a partner can look at the same innovation from a completely different position. They may understand manufacturing realities, customers, applications or technical challenges through years of experience in their own field. In return, a breakthrough technology can introduce possibilities they have never had available before.

That is where collaboration gets interesting. I don’t think the best partnerships are relationships in which one side teaches and the other learns. Both should leave the conversation smarter.

A partner should challenge assumptions, bring a perspective you don’t have inside your organization and sometimes ask the question you weren’t expecting. At the same time, you should be doing the same for them. The value is in the exchange.

As a CEO, I have learned to value partners who improve the questions we are asking, not only those who validate the answers we already have. In complex innovation, the right question at the right moment can change the direction of what comes next.

4. Set clear boundaries before you collaborate

Collaboration works best when both sides know where the boundaries are. What are we sharing? What are we building together? What remains proprietary? What does success look like for each side?

Companies need intellectual property, differentiation and competitive advantage. Partnership shouldn’t blur those things. In fact, I believe the clearer you are about what remains uniquely yours, the more confidently you can explore what makes sense to do together. This is also why I don’t see competition and partnership as opposites. Organizations can have different commercial objectives and still find specific areas where their interests align. The important thing is to enter those relationships with clarity rather than ambiguity.

I don’t believe clarity limits collaboration. It creates the trust that allows both sides to be more ambitious about what they can achieve together.

The opportunity on both sides of the table

Entrepreneurs are trained to think about differentiation, and rightly so. What have we built that is unique? What can we do better? What is difficult to replicate? Those questions are essential when you’re creating breakthrough technology.

But once something genuinely new exists, I believe another question deserves equal attention: How far can we take it?

For companies creating breakthrough technology, that means understanding where the right relationships can extend the value and impact of what they have built. For leaders in established industries, there is another question worth asking: What could become possible if we combine what we already know with a capability that didn’t exist before?

I believe some of the most interesting opportunities begin when both sides ask that question.

Breakthrough innovation may begin inside one organization, but its full potential is often shaped by the expertise it meets along the way. And working with an established industry doesn’t make a breakthrough company less ambitious about what it has created.

As Barra’s words remind us: We can compete, and we can partner. The leadership skill is knowing when collaboration can create something more valuable for both sides and help move an entire industry forward.