Defining partnership intent

Posted on by Bart Doorneweert

When you think you have an idea for an innovation that will really propel your business forward, you always wonder: will we serve our customers in the best way if we do it all ourselves? What do you weigh-in in order to decide whether you can best make, buy, or ally?

I often get asked such questions about the point at which it makes sense to consider a partnership. Here’s the framework I use to answer those questions. Flick through the slides to have a closer look at the components.

These are the essential 4 factors you need to consider, to determine whether you’re in the most suitable position to launch an innovation yourself. You have to look at these factors like a kind of a puzzle. If you answer “no” to one of these questions, then one of the pieces is missing. You’ll need to seriously consider reaching out to other parties to obtain it. Use your aal the knowledge about your company, to underpin the decision whether or not you’re in the best possible to position to do it all yourself.

Take-aways:

  1. Figuring out your partnership intent is important. It will help you define what your priority is for partnering, as well as what you would require from a partner.
  2. Once you’ve established your intent, then start the work on designing your partnership options. For this you can use the partnership canvas.

Interested to learn more about Partnership Design?

Check out Training opportunities!

or

You can join the Partnership Design Linkedin group!

Further inquiries? Send an email to: info@partnershipcanvas.com

Strategic Partnerships: A business model blind spot?

Posted on by Bart Doorneweert

I’ve been working on the Partnership Canvas over the last weeks, prototyping and testing it to make a seamless fit as a strategy tool with the Business Model Canvas.

Particularly, I’ve been looking into the whole experience of the strategic conversation on partnerships. When do people start raising questions on partnerships, what do they do to makes sense of their options, how do they select, engage, and negotiate with partners? During this research I also performed some search terms analytics in Google trends using important key words relating to strategic partnerships. The following (surprising) graph showed up:

Interest in strategic partnership related key words Source: Google Trends
Interest in strategic partnership related key words Source: Google Trends

Apparently interest in strategic partnerships is in decline, even though interest in business models is on the rise. This is surprising, because phenomena like channel partnering, and sharing resources are quite common business innovation phenomena, but maybe not as common as I might think. Could this imply that we’re still underutilising the potential of the partnership building block to design more robust business models?

I have a hunch that partnerships are a blind spot on the business design radar. From my experience in conducting business model workshops, partnerships are likely thrown into the equation but rarely seriously addressed. We want to have better conversations about partnerships. Especially, we want to know what the potential is of a partnership, even before it has been negotiated and implemented. That is why I’m building a partnership canvas add-on tool to the business model canvas: a tool for partnership prototyping to help improve the strategic conversation on linking partnering business models together.

Interested to learn more about Partnership Design?

Check out Training opportunities!

or

You can join the Partnership Design Linkedin group!

Further inquiries? Send an email to: info@partnershipcanvas.com