Business Partnerships for Development in Africa report has been published
The report is 33 pages long, and touches upon the issues of regional integration, environmental sustainability, enterprise development and human resources. It finishes with a page on building a learning path in partnerships for African development. I will read the report in the coming days and post a longer piece about it.
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During one very rainy Bergen afternoon, around 50 information managers from across Europe met to discuss mergers and acquisitions among libraries. Financial crises was pushing some larger libraries into acquisitions through which they could acquire niche information services that would ensure their dominance on the market — and smaller libraries were facing tough funding constraints that were pushing them to consider integration into larger institutions. During the discussions, one of the key issues that emerged was the question of how can smaller institutes — often niche players with unique competitive advantages — maintain their innovation capabilities once they are integrated in larger, more bureaucratized and slower organisations. The answer was not straightforward, and panelists were eagerly sharing and comparing their experiences. At a certain moment, someone from the audience — let’s call her Natalie — is called to provide input with her story. Her contribution is hesitant, and she says her library does only “pure” partnerships. She insists in saying that partnership work of her institute has nothing to do with mergers and acquisitions.
The research on partnerships says differently: mergers and acquisitions are form of partnership: they certainly stand at the end of the partnering spectrum given that they represent a move that can not be undone — but form of partnership they are. If you think about it for a second, in order to enter a merger alignment between partners — so called “partner fit” — needs to be extraordinary. No one would buy another organisation without thorough strategic thinking and long-term vision about how merger will benefit both parties. Actually, we could say that merger is the purest form of partnership, as degree of synergy needs to be at the peak.
Not for Natalie, who claims her partnering work is completely different animal from merger — and it is not just semantics. After listening to her story in entirety, it becomes clear what she means by “pure” partnership: she is taking about straightforward content collaboration, along the lines of or training staff from partner library, or producing joint paper on library management. This form of partnering is certainly much simpler than merger, and can represent only a minor part of overall organisational workload. I believe that she is perceiving such collaboration as “pure” exactly because it is such limited exercise, one that can potentially be managed by one/few staff members. By being so well defined and self-contained, such content partnership often does not involve lot of bureaucracy, agreements, procedures, Terms of Reference, modification of working routines, evaluation mechanisms: it seems to require limited amount of management, as focus is on the content. The implicit assumption is that the rest must follow anyways, given that the idea is good and partners trust each other.
This reminds me of myth of romantic love. Developed in late 19th century, and still very persistent today, this vision of love is portraying love in its purest and most distilled form. Angels that wonder across Earth only to (re)unite, ladies that die of love, gentlemen that spend hours sighing over picture of the loved one. In one book, lovers are described in a bed, embraced and enjoying the essence of love. They say they would like that this moment lasts forever.While these books can be beautiful — romanticism is one of my favorite literary periods — they have contributed to creation of dangerous myth that “love is enough”. It is not, because as you get up from the bed and re-enter the reality, you will need to proactively manage your relationship.
The same is with partnerships: in development sector, and specially among NGOs, there is not enough awareness that outcome of partnership will not depend only on content overlap, level of expertise or amount of trust. Not thinking strategically about which micro-mechanisms and practices are needed to manage partnerships can easily lead to collaboration debacle. It is not by chance that private sector firms say they success rate of partnering with NGOs is significantly lower than success rate of partnering with another private sector company (substantiate the data). While a certain degree of failure rate can probably be ascribed to differences in visions of the world, I believe that a good portion of failures is motivated by lack of NGO partnering capabilities.
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John Cantwell from Rutgers Business School tells us that we are being myopic in our research on innovation networks and multinational corporations (MNCs). Our understanding of networking for innovation is partial, as it focuses on external networks, neglecting networking dynamic inside the large multinational corporations. Most importantly, the two sets of networks are becoming strongly connected, creating a complex architecture of open innovation networks.
In his excellent paper “Blurred boundaries between firms, and new boundaries within (large multinational) firms: the impact of decentralized networks for innovation” (get the PDF of PowerPoint presentation) Cantwell examines the linkages between intra-firm and inter-firm networks. So far, the research has not fully recognised the blurring of internal and external networks, and has addressed them separately, or through litterature on subsidiary devolution within MNCs or through research on intra-firm alliances. While literature on networks treats “network governance purely in terms of inter-firm external network relationships”, international business literature focuses on how internal organisational structures impact subsidiaries, without researching “the influences on the structure of the firm coming from subsidiary level.
The author claims that such “conventional separation in the treatment of internal and external networks is increasingly unhelpful, and may now often be misleading”, given the emergence of “crossover networks” in which “internal and external (components of) networks have become steadily more closely connected”. Teams, subsidiaries, sub-units, are taking part in various external networks and choose to collaborate with some — or compete with other — units or teams within the same MNC.
But what is happenning on the headquarters level? First, MNCs have become “less monolithic bodies”. Second, they need to manage more organisationally decentralised system of innovation. But what keeps the MNC from succumbing to centrifugal forces and dismembering in a set of smaller firms? Shared knowledge base. To say it with Cantwell’s words, “the greater decentralization and localization of their competence-creating search efforts still continues to rely on an even more intensive common exploitation of a shared knowledge base, and this provides the glue that continues to hold the MNC together”.
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Geert Laporte, head of Institutional Relations at European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), paints a dynamic picture of institutes’ partners. While partnerships with Northern institutions follow more predictable route of multi annual institutional agreements, the partnerships in the South have been characterised so far have been rich but also ad-hoc. In 2007, ECDPM formalises its partnership strategy, integrating various partnership activities under the same strategic framework, and creating partnership manager position.
In one of the key moments of the interview, Geert how ECDPM has two strategic objectives when it comes to partnerships with Southern institutions: linking up with the “peer” institute of excellence, and building the institutional capacity of fragile yet important emerging actors. Balancing the two objectives is not always easy, but in the end both routes lead to stronger impact of ECDPM’s work. While linking with peer institutions allows to access top researchers and networks, working “in the kitchen” of emerging institutions like African Union Commission will allow ECDPM to be closely linked with one of the key institutions in the near future.
The interview revolves around three questions:
a. Introduction to ECDPM and its partners
b. Building alliance capacity: how ECDPM has moved from ad-hoc approach to partnerships to more strategic framework (starts at 2′05)
c. What does ECDPM look for when negotiating partnerships (starts at 6′55).
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Peter Ballantyne on Euforic and partnerships
Peter Ballantyne from Euforic — Europ’s Forum on International Cooperation — gives an insight on how small secretariat (4 people) can manage a rich and very dynamic partnership network. Euforic is an interesting organisation to learn from, as they are both content aggregator (providing free content aggregation service around issues in development cooperation) and cooperative that is partially financed by more than 30 partners. Balancing provision of content and servicing partners is not the easiest task says Peter, but Euforic managed to do it by accomplish it by two major strategic changes. On one side, content production is now more automated, freeing more time for partnership activities. At the same time, Euforic has abbandoned “standard” approach, trying to offer same services to all the members and partners: flexibility is they, and tailor-mase soltions allow Euforic to communicate better with its members and partners.
The interview totals five minutes, and revolves around three questions:
a) Introduction to Euforic and Euforic’s main partners
b) Balancing workload on two Euforic’s main activities, content generation and partnering.
c) How does Euforic present itself as a credible partner.
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