Kim DeCoste is vice president and editor-at-large for ICOSA where she manages the media team, and contributed to editorial planning for the magazine and a book on connections + collaboration. A few of her articles are “The Evolution of E-Learning,” “A Win-Win: Kroenke Sports Enterprises Does Great Work for Kids & Education,” “Living the Mission: Private STEM Solutions & Public Education,” “Authentic Leadership is Gender Neutral” and “Closing the Education Gap.”

ICOSA is thought of as organic―focused on developing collaboration and taking it to the next level which is transformation. The method ICOSA uses can conceptually be adopted to fit into high schools but specifically higher education. To be a doer one needs to learn to walk with others, and identify goals and meeting those goals in a manageable way. ICOSA would like to work with higher education in providing students with collaborative methods.

Amazon is an example of a company who has successfully transformed. Amazon.com launched its marketplace in 2002 selling books, music, videos and DVS’s and now has since developed the Amazon Kindle e-book reader and sells just about any product globally.

The difficult areas of collaboration are blending the different view of what success looks like and keeping people together and focused on the mission.