P.ACT: Partnership Co-Design Toolkit: 12 Practical Tools for Co-Designing Inclusive Partnership Models

From MIT D-Lab and SEED. How do we co-design partnership models where all partners — despite their differences — have a shared understanding and buy-in for the value created and captured within the partnership? The Partnership Co-design Toolkit (P.ACT) seeks to tackle this challenge and offers a disciplined, inclusive, and practical approach to co-creating better value chain partnerships.

Collaboration between impact entrepreneurs and large corporate, government, or development actors holds the promise of scaling key innovations, yet these hybrid partnerships are difficult to forge, and many often fail due to uneven foundations. This toolkit is targeted towards impact entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, partnership brokers and facilitators, and accelerators supporting impact entrepreneurs who are initiating value chain partnerships, partnerships where organizations seek to integrate existing or create new value chains to bring these innovations to market.

Designed to maximize partnership success, P.ACT offers four unique features:

• Co-design process: A four stage co-design framework to ensure inclusive participation and continuous engagement of all partners.

• Value focus: Emphasis on defining both the value created and the value captured through the partnership. It focuses the partners' attention on generating value for their customers and beneficiaries as well as for their organizations.

• Collaborative approach: Individual self-assessment and reflection alongside collective problem solving, constructive dialogue, decision making, and action planning.

• Modular use: Enabling users to diagnose their partnership needs and helps them identify the right tools to move their partnership forward.