Concept of collaboration

Although everybody has an intuitive notion of what collaboration is, this concept is often confused with cooperation. For many people, the two terms are indistinguishable. Even when a distinction is made, there are many different uses of the term collaboration in the current literature. The ambiguities reach a higher level when other related terms are considered such as networking, communication, and coordination (Denise, 1999; Grosz, 1996; Himmelman, 2001; Pollard, 2005). Although each one of these concepts is an important component of collaboration, they are not of equal value; neither one is equivalent to it.