Mechanisms are provided to implement a cognitive system collaboration identification and recommendation system (CSCIRS). The CSCIRS stores, in a cognitive system database, entries corresponding to a plurality of cognitive system instances. Each entry identifies operational characteristics of a corresponding cognitive system instance. The CSCIRS receives, from a requestor, a request to identify a potential collaborative cognitive system instance and identifies, based on the request and the cognitive system database, a candidate collaborative cognitive system instance. The CSCIRS generates a collaboration recommendation based on the identification and outputs an output corresponding to the collaboration recommendation.