Tom Harrison

Following a number of management roles in NGOs and the tea sector, Tom became an independent consultant focussing on private sector development and cross-sector partnership. He has completed assignments for, among others, DFID, GIZ, the World Bank and UNDP. For a decade Tom had a lead role in management of the Business Innovation Facility (BIF) for which he was Technical Director for which he supporting BIF’s work in Myanmar he was involved in supporting large companies to develop innovative business models that benefit people on low incomes. This year Tom has led new partnership development for the Work and Opportunities For Women (WOW) Programme and has undertaken a review of a market-systems programme in Zambia and an evaluation of a partnership between Oxfam and Unilever.

Take your partners: new Insider on large companies and collaboration

4. Jul 2013

In my recent blog ‘The rights and wrongs of partnership in the BIF portfolio’ I gave the Practitioner Hub readership a tantalising glimpse of the contents of a forthcoming Insider on large companies and partnership. Never wanting to assume that the surge of interest that this no doubt created would last all that long, I am now pleased to be able to tell you that the Insider, ‘Take your partners: large companies and collaboration in the BIF portfolio', is now available, as well a new checklist on partnership and Inclusive Business.

I am also pleased to note that the Insider helps to answer a question recent posed by Suzanne Dagseven in a blog on the Practitioner Hub: ‘Are partnerships more or less relevant to early stage ventures than their more mature counterparts?’ As she points out, small start-up companies supported by IAP use many forms of collaboration, and the BIF portfolio indicates that large companies do too. The answer to her question could well be – ‘neither! When progressing IB projects partnerships are equally relevant to both.’

I am happy to have such answers to hand now. It wasn’t the case a month or two ago, when I began to wonder what on earth I would be able to write about the BIF experience of partnership. Everywhere I looked across the portfolio I could see companies partnering as they progressed their inclusive business projects, but I was dazzled by the sheer variety of these collaborations. My notes were awash with tables, diagrams, figures and charts with no clear lessons emerging except that companies in this space clearly aren’t doing IB projects on their own.

Around that time, I spent a day with colleagues from the Partnership Brokers Association. As we compared our diverse experiences of facilitating the process of collaboration between organisations from the private, public and not-for-profit sectors, we reflected that we often found ourselves promoting collaboration between unusual partners for the benefits we have seen it can bring, whilst not always having the evidence for this as readily to hand as we would wish. For example, we think that cross-sector partnership can lead to creative problem solving and innovation. We also know – but find it hard to evidence – that a particular style of quiet, and often invisible, facilitation (which we call ‘partnership brokering’) can be vital to the success of complex collaborations. We challenged ourselves to try harder to ‘find the evidence’ for what we know from our experience.

I looked again at the material I had from the BIF portfolio with this challenge in mind. Around the same time, my attention was drawn to the differences between creating a new market for the BOP, and making markets where there were already BOP interests work better. Looking at my data through this lens revealed that there did indeed seem to be a clustering between companies that were engaged in market creation, and the most active partnering activity. This suggested to me companies could be partnering in order to support the innovation that is required when a new BOP market is being created. I decided to look in greater depth at three relevant project in the BIF portfolio. As I share in the Insider, emerging from these projects I can trace the link between partnering, and the need to create new ways of working.

In an interview I conducted with a manager of the companies concerned, she was sighing about the challenges that were emerging as the company begins to grapple with this new way of working. ‘Managing this project,’ she explained, ‘is like choreographing a dance when the music has already started, the dancers don’t know the steps and new dancers keep joining all the time.’

I realised then that I had evidence for a link between the use of partnerships for innovation, and the challenges, in practice, of collaboration. I also found the title for my Insider. So….for those of you who need to collaborate to realise your inclusive business objectives: ‘Take your partners!’