The ongoing individualization of products forces companies to focus more on flexibility and adaptability. To achieve this, cooperating companies need to intensify their cooperation into collaboration. New types of collaboration are enabled by a wave of digitalization reducing organizational efforts and risks of collaboration. Especially smart services can be a medium to incentivize more interaction. This paper contributes a method to connect the loose ends from the study of collaboration on a strategic level to the digitalization trend on an operational level, representing all key aspects of a collaboration like relevant stakeholders, case of application and system interrelation.