High failure rates often observed in practice suggest that collaborative relationships are still not well understood. In this paper we investigate the nature of these relationships from second-order Cybernetics and Social Systems Theory perspectives. Thereby we develop a novel theoretical framework, the Collaborative System, which explains: 1. the organizational function of collaboration; 2. the system’s elementary operation; 3. its coupling mechanism; 4. the system autonomy and; 5. its ‘value’ creation mechanism. The proposed framework is innovative and has far reaching consequences for the understanding of different forms of collaborative relationships. Nevertheless, it raises a whole new set of questions yet to be explored.