Launchpad: Working With Partners

How might I work most effectively with a partner to achieve success? (And how do I find one?)

This is part of the Frontier Tech Launchpad blog series, sharing key content from our 3rd Launchpad session: Working with partners. Read more about the Launchpad here.

In order to take an idea into the real world, pilot teams need to bring on an implementing partner. They usually bring sectoral or technical expertise which makes navigating the landscape you’re looking to experiment in smoother and more efficient, and help make each Pioneer’s idea a reality.

But working with an external partner in lean, agile ways to test something frontier isn’t straightforward. From procurement and tender all the way to learning out loud and keeping aligned on vision, we’ve learned lessons from supportive over 70 pilots across over 20 countries.

In session three of our Launchpad series, Frontier Tech coaches Dave and Nada shared 8 pieces of advice to find, set up and manage successful partnerships.

Regularly Evaluate Team Composition

Some of you might have already identified a sole sourced partner by now. We're here to tell you that you can review your team at any time, and over the next  18 months precedent suggests that you will contract for additional support. 

Timing Is Everything

You'll want to look for external support when you have a clear need for expertise on a critical, time-pressed question. This question might involve getting to work and testing in the “real-world”. 

Before you bring other groups or individuals in, make sure you have a minimum degree of understanding of your problem area, where you want to leverage and an overall ambition for the pilot. And, bear in mind that a procurement process can take  many weeks.

Understand what’s possible and who potential partners might be

You might want to conduct an Early Market Engagement, which allows you to engage with multiple suppliers before you undertake procurement. It can help you to understand the specification you are building and helps draw interest in a potential invitation to tender (ITT).

Alternatively, you can speak to people in the ecosystem, including industry, academics, specialists etc.  

At the Hub, we have often led our own Marketplace of Ideas, which combines the above two activities. A Marketplace of Ideas includes a wide range of stakeholders who have their own perspective into the problem area and ideas for potential solutions. An important feature of these sessions is that they don’t usually put the competitive process at the centre of proceedings. It’s the first instance in which the pilot is introduced to groups and offers a space for friendly collaboration which ultimately helps you build an understanding of what you might want a  supplier to build.

With the ELEK TEY pilot, we wanted to better understand the problem space and generate ideas from domain experts who could think together to feed into the RfP. We did this by setting up a workshop in Ziguinchor, gathering approximately 50 people from diverse backgrounds over the course of a whole day. Activities included creating a range of personas around potential solutions, as well as collectively responding to key questions the team had around a potential solution. Again, we stayed away from requesting specific solution ideas and focused on the problem at hand, which we think made the best use of collective intelligence in the room and allowed people to work openly and collaboratively. We found our technical implementers Joko Sun, who are solar energy experts, through this process, and boatmen we would later work with were also initially engaged as part of the workshop.

Crafting Effective ITTs (Invitation to Tender)

Generally, the clearer the idea for scope of work your team has, the more likely it is that you will find the right partner to deliver it. 

However, there are some interesting tricks you can play to maximise the procurement process. Knowing when and how to play your hand is an important skill. It's time for a short exercise to show you how:

Exercise: pitching your ITT 

Write a mini scope of work (2-3 bullet points) for an expert or organisation you think you will need as part of your pilot. 

Now first, make it more specific and directive.  

• What does that do to the ITT?  

• What kind of responses will we get? 

• What impact will this have on how they understand the programme? 

Now the same, but take the original statement and make it more vague – don’t give the game away! Perhaps focus on the problem. Answer the same questions again.

When do you think one approach might be better than the other?

What you might be able to see is that when creating an ITT, you can experiment with specific and directive descriptions versus more abstract or vague statements. By tailoring the language, you can elicit certain types of responses and gauge the level of understanding and creativity of potential partners.

The ITT can help you attract people to apply to be part of the programme.

Example: using drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology for desert locust control in East Africa. When it came to the invitation to tender, we purposefully chose to be vague as we knew that there would be suppliers out there who would be interested, and we wanted to see if 1. there were different approaches people might take, and 2. if they could prove what they knew (or didn’t know) already. We had an application that recommended using surveillance drones and hundreds of thousands of ducks. Not on our wavelength!

Creating comprehensive scoring and interviewing processes

Once applications are in, we usually have a 1st round scoring process and then invite people to interview in order to assess their suitability. Something that’s important is that the scoring criteria for this first round should be framed to score on all the points that for you would make a good partner. Does it match the SoW you identified? 

This criteria could cover points including e.g. technical competency, sector experience, geographic or ecosystem links, value for money, co-investment, engagement with the Hub method etc. 

Once you get to the interview process, you can invite external experts to join and lend their own expertise, and the Hub can pay for this time. You will have opportunities to ask questions directly to the potential supplier, so it’s worth noting that there is no such thing as a stupid or basic question here. It’s often surprising what you find out when you trust your gut in this way.

Finally, you don’t have to choose anyone at this stage! But if you have, that's it, you’ve found your partner! 

Streamlined Onboarding Process

Now time to properly start your relationship with your selected partner. However, before you start developing your first sprint, you need to know that some work is happening in the background with them and although it is not work that you will be directly involved with, it is important to keep this in mind.  

The first step involves your partner completing a due diligence questionnaire which requires information on the company’s ownership, policies, insurances and any disclosures. We check all of this information to ensure we are contracting suitable partners on behalf of FCDO. If the basic requirements are not met, we then work with partners to introduce policies and insurances as required. Following this we draft the head contract which includes the budget and duration (typically £75k and up to 18 months) and the wider scope of work as defined by the ITT. 

Roles and responsibilities

It is also important to identify who is in the team and the roles and responsibilities split between the different team members at the start of the project.  In some cases, the project might pivot from the initial plan and so reviewing the roles and responsibilities in the planning stage of every sprint can also be good practice. 

The typical team structure is the pioneer who keeps the vision of the pilot,  the FT Hub coaches who will guide the team through the methodology and the implementing partner who is the solution or technology expert. Sometimes it is also important to consider who else should be in the team such as local consultants or other partners bearing in mind the organisation’s and team limitations of the main implementing partner.

The role of the pioneer is paramount for the success of the pilot and so it is encouraged that pioneers should take as much of a role as possible. In our EmpatIA pilot for example, our pioneer Rodrigo, has an impressive stakeholder network in Lema, Peru and our implementing partners are technology experts but are based in the UK. The pioneer chose to take a bigger role utilising his local connections to support the implementation team. With such a structure the pilot has been making considerable progress. 

Establishing Effective Team Dynamics through creating a team charter

In addition to roles and responsibilities, it is also important to determine ways of working together. This includes not only  practical methods of collaboration; including the frequency of meetings, preferred communication channels, and necessary updates but also a shared understanding of the values that the team will uphold for the duration of the pilot. This shared set of values will allow the team to establish a cohesive and productive working environment and can underpin important decisions that need to be made.

We have found that a fun way of establishing this shared set of values is to develop a team charter where all team members can identify their individual values and the team can then look for common ground to get a consolidated group of values that make up a team charter.  A good starting point for this exercise is to think through previous experiences of working in a team and to think through the aspects that made some teams much stronger than others. It would be great to incorporate these aspects into the team charter and to give you an idea of what some of our pilots put together, below are a few examples. Some teams went further and created a team slogan!

Once you have established your roles and how you are going to work together you are ready to get started with planning for your first sprint.