The idea that you can systematically design opportunities with the best and the brightest in a given field sits at the heart of building Elite Crowds.  It turns the consultative ‘single designer’ paradigm on its head and allows for a set of multidisciplinary inputs to generate truly unexpected leaps and connections in any brainstorm or problem-solving scenario.

If you frame your Elite Crowd right, you can make it so everyone wants to get involved; they don’t need to be paid, because everyone gains from the interaction.  Participants in Elite Crowds can learn from each other and open up new opportunities that no individual player could have unlocked alone.  Bill Joy once said that “the smartest people in the room always work for someone else” and that if you want to solve problems it is better to “create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals”.  Building an Elite Crowd is about purposefully building, landscaping and growing that garden…

10 Investor Needs

Cazneau President, Jeff Hamaoui, recently spoke at a meeting hosted by the State Department’s Global Partnership Initiative.   He sat on a panel alongside a group of government agencies and faced an audience of investors and industry specialists trying to work out how to better work together.

During the course of the discussion he counted ten discrete and concrete needs voiced by the private sector to improve public private partnerships – and surprisingly, not all the demands we financial…

1. Coherent Policy: chose a policy, back it and set consistent agency goals against it.
2. Commit to your Policy: Over an extended period of time, policy shifts damage the ability of businesses to deliver over time.
3. Local Market Leverage: Provide mechanisms to leverage agency knowledge base, networks and resources in local markets.
4. Local Political Leverage: Where appropriate, provide access to political air cover in target markets.
5. Single Compliance: Create common compliance standards across agencies to lower compliance barriers.
6. Cleantech Atlas: Provide a single, clear communications channel on available resources.
7. Risk Products: Provide mechanisms to lower risk on capital investments in emerging markets.
8. Domestic Support: Provide domestic corporate finance vs. international project finance.
9. IP protection: Look at ways of better protecting IP in emerging markets. [I personally have a different view on this – preferring to structure IP towards collaboration]
10. Create the Space: Create a multi-dimensional solution space, both actual and virtual, for people to come together and solve these complex problems together.

The message from government was pretty clear: provide a clear channel to define your needs, ideas and frustrations.

Public Private Partnerships (or PPP’s) are all the rage right now. With money and resources tight in both the private sector and the public sector, the drivers for getting cross sector partners to work together have never been so aligned. There is a proliferation of events and discussions about partnering; I have myself been engaged with at least ten involving the US government alone, and at least as many across a variety of companies, foundations and investment funds.

What strikes me most in these conversations is that people have no idea what they are proposing when they talk about ‘partnerships’.

The PPP conversation is usually divided between people who are looking for investment, for business, for responsibility dollars or for charity. The flows and dynamics of agendas and needs are so strong that these partnership events take on the flavor of a bazaar; everyone is selling something and few seem to have an eye on building a bigger opportunity.

Until we change how organizations come together to explore partnership opportunities and until we equip the institutional point people by providing them with the flexibility of thinking, decision making and resourcing necessary to try something out, we are doomed to build partnerships that don’t quite work for anyone.

To be valuable, strategic and scaled; PPP’s need a different institutional mandate; staffing by senior decision makers, real resourcing to develop them over time and a flexibility around risk and institutional engagement norms.

We have recently been working with a variety of organizations – government, foundations, corporations – to help them think through strategies for approaching new or emerging markets. What do these diverse players have in common? Firstly, they have all recognized the need for a more systemic or collaborative approach to their challenges. Secondly, they have realized that the tools they are accustomed to using aren’t working. This is clearly not business as usual.

Business as Unusual

The first task in addressing a challenge that requires the input of multiple players, resources and types of capital is to let go of the ‘linear’ approach to business design. Linear design goes something like this; I have a bright idea (if I am sophisticated I may design it around my customers needs and experience), I gather data around that idea, I write up a business / project / campaign plan [insert as appropriate] and I take it out to investors, partners or my boss for buy in. Then we may or may not go to market.

In a simple ‘single player’ design environment this linear design philosophy (especially with the tweaks and iterations of human centered design) is provably a successful, and to my mind the preferred, way forward. The problems come when you have to design not just for customers, but for multiple partners who need for your design to work for them in order for the opportunity to be mutually successful (this on top of the linear design challenges of designing a new business).

Using a linear design process in this scenario is often disastrous as people try to second guess the drivers, interests, thresholds and triggers that will motivate everyone else in the system to move. That is why so many businesses fail to meet the challenges of an emerging market where government is a critical player, and why so many government and non-profit programs trying to engage the private sector ultimately end up hopelessly marginalized.

So what are the baseline conditions for good ‘collaborative’ design – how does the super connector connect?

Top Rules for Super Connected System Design

1. LET GO – If you are going to design a system, you can’t represent the system – let go of the idea of being in charge (this is not the same as not leading a process).
2. LET IN [Not open innovation but it can tie to an OI process] – Work out a way to hear voices early – If you invite your system into the design process early on, you can design their needs into the heart of your offering.
3. GO WIDE – The wider you go up front the more likely that something truly ‘innovative and appropriate will emerge’.
4. INVEST TIME – This process requires time, and an investment in relationships – expect to be frustrated as kinks get worked out.
5. PREPARE TO PLAY – This also requires a degree of playfulness, exploration and the unexpected.
6. GET SERIOUS: FOCUS FAST – When things get serious, you need to have serious resources and people available to take it forward.
7. PLAN TO FLEX – Think about the resources required to structure differently (legal and financial).
8. MANAGE INTERNALLY – Internal change management – firewall or engage and train.
9. ITERATE
10. BE CLEAR ABOUT SUCCESS – Place clear goals around your opportunity and needs – discard quickly if there is not a fit.
11. PARTNER AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE – Partner strategically and as little as possible(!). The closer you get to a real opportunity, the fewer partners the better.
12. UNDERSTAND WHAT A PARTNER IS – Create a lexicography of partnership – differentiate between those who provide service and those who need to be part of the business.

Warren Buffet recently quoted an African proverb that runs something like “if you want to go fast go alone, but if you want to go far, go together”… At the heart of the decision process between a linear design processes and the ‘super connected’ co-design approach lies the simple question: who do you need to take along with you to succeed?

All too often what trades between organizations is the simplest thing for everyone to understand and quantify: money. Money is where most value conversations begin – think of this as the ‘single value’ conversation. The single value conversation makes sense when all you are looking for is money; however, leading off with the single value conversation is toxic to systems thinking and innovation.

The problem is that the initial focus on financial value blocks any exploration of the real trades that could occur between organizations and stymies the enormous potential for innovation that lies at the heart of collaboration.

So What Values?

As you look at what organizations bring to the table it helps to define ‘value’. For instance, in much of our work, we analyze partner value by looking at the Four C’s; capital, capacity, credibility and creativity.

Once you’ve identified an organizations value assets you can start combining them far more creatively and move from a single to a multiple value conversation.

For example, anyone approaching an investment source with a single value (financial) mindset, the possible outcomes from that conversation are binary: you either get the money or you don’t. However, if both sides of the discussion are assessing the opportunities for engaging each other from a multiple value mindset the routes to a successful business combination go up exponentially. In fact, what you find is that the conversations between organizations are usually not about the movement of money; they’re about the movement of value.

So, rule number one for a multiple value conversation – if you are looking to develop new and valuable business relationships don’t start with a financial discussion. The multiple value conversation begins by asking questions like: What have you got that is valuable? How might that value engage with what we’ve got that is valuable?