We developed a framework that assists in capturing the differences between two organizations. Collaborative distance captures the degree of similarity between the cooperating organizations across four separate levels of analysis: sector, organization, functional, and individual. Organizations that are very similar to each other are said to have “low collaborative distance” and organizations that differ on important characteristics are said to have “high collaborative distance”. We propose that this measure coupled with problem complexity ought to dictate the structure and safeguards for inter-organizational collaboration. We show a sample calculation of this measure. \