Collaboration

Collaboration has become a dirty word, an overused euphemism for paid content-creation and distribution, hopefully to an engaged and targeted, but potentially entirely false audience.

I’ve been @my_muro on instagram for 18 months now and I get almost daily DM’s proposing collaborations, shortly followed by follower statistics and a price tag. Before I go any further, I should say this grumble isn’t against targeted cold-calling, any business trying to grow should be doing it, but please don't call it collaboration!

Considering first days of summer we’ve just experienced in London, Ben and Jerry’s couldn’t better example of actual collaboration.  Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, childhood friends who together created an ice cream Jerry could enjoy as an anosmia suffer, the condition which led him having no sense of taste, and their trade-mark delicious chunks to add texture.  As individuals these two could have created any ice cream, yet in collaboration they created magic, what’s more is that it was Jerry's weakness that provided the space for that magic to happen.

This is the sort of collaboration I want to do with MURO, bringing the skilled and the unskilled together, giving them an common objective (like making toys for example), the space to work together, and seeing what’s created when people play around.

I’m still waiting for various things to be confirmed but I’m very excited about the plans I’ve planned.  Watch out for announcements over the next couple of weeks.

Rest assured, there will be ice cream.