Examples
Educational
The Big Ten Academic Alliance in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic U.S., the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, the Five College Consortium in Massachusetts, and the National Honda Consortium are among the oldest and most successful higher education consortia in the world. The Big Ten Academic Alliance"), formerly known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, includes members of the Big Ten athletic conference. Participants in Five Colleges, Inc. are: Amherst College, Hampshire College"), Mount Holyoke College"), Smith College"), and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Another example of a successful consortium is the Ohio Five Colleges"): Oberlin College, Ohio Wesleyan University, Kenyon College"), College of Wooster"), and Denison University"). The Claremont Consortium (known as Claremont Colleges) consists of Pomona College, Claremont Graduate University, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, Pitzer College, and Keck Graduate Institute. These consortia have pooled the resources of their member schools and universities to share human and material assets, as well as to link academic and administrative resources.
An example of a nonprofit consortium is the Appalachian College Association (ACA), located in Richmond, Kentucky. The association is made up of 35 liberal arts colleges and private universities spread across the central Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Together, these higher education institutions serve about 42,500 students. Six research universities in the region (University of Kentucky, University of North Carolina, University of Tennessee, West Virginia University, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech) are affiliated with the ACA. These institutions help the ACA in reviewing grant and scholarship applications, conducting workshops, and providing technical assistance The ACA works to serve higher education in the rural regions of these five states.
Commercial
An example of a commercial consortium is a group of banks that collaborate to make a loan, also known as a syndicate. This type of loan is more commonly known as a syndicated loan. In England it is common for a consortium to buy football clubs in financial trouble to keep them out of liquidation.
Alyeska Pipeline Service Company"), the company that built the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in the 1970s, was initially a consortium of BP, ARCO, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, Mobil, Unocal and Koch Alaska Pipeline Company.
Aerospace
Airbus Industries was formed in 1970 as a consortium of aerospace manufacturers. The retention of production and engineering assets by the associated companies effectively converted Airbus Industries into a sales and marketing company.[3] This arrangement resulted in inefficiencies due to conflicts of interest inherent to the four associated companies, which were both shareholders and subcontractors of the consortium. The companies collaborated in the development of the Airbus range, but kept the financial details of their own production activities and tried to maximize the transfer prices of their subassemblies.[4].
In 2001, EADS (created by the merger of Airbus' French, German and Spanish sister companies) and BAE Systems (the British sister company) transferred their Airbus production assets to a new company, Airbus SAS. In exchange, they obtained 80% and 20% of the shares, respectively. BAE would later sell its share to EADS.
The Tornado was developed and built by Panavia Aircraft GmbH, a trinational consortium consisting of British Aerospace (formerly British Aircraft Corporation), MBB of West Germany and Aeritalia of Italy.
The aircraft first flew on August 14, 1974 and entered service in 1979-1980. Due to its multipurpose design, it was able to replace several different fleets of aircraft in the air forces that adopted it. The Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) became the sole export operator of the Tornado, apart from the three original partner nations. Including all variants, 992 aircraft were built. Why so much about the plane and so little about the consortium, which is the subject of this WP article?
Cooperation
Coopetition is a word coined from cooperation and competition. It is used when otherwise competing companies collaborate in a consortium to cooperate in areas not strategic to their core businesses. They prefer to reduce their costs in these non-strategic areas and compete in others where they can better differentiate themselves.
For example, the GENIVI Alliance, now called COVESA, is a non-profit consortium between different automobile manufacturers to facilitate the construction of an in-vehicle entertainment system.
Another example is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is a consortium that standardizes web technologies such as HTML, XML, and CSS.
Government, academia and industry
The Food Safety and Health Institute is a consortium formed by the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and members of the US food industry. Some of the work carried out at the institute includes: "the evaluation and validation of new and novel food safety and preservation technologies, processing and packaging systems, microbiological and chemical methods, health-promoting food components and risk management strategies."[5].