Asia P3 Hub’s Journey: A Reflection
Our First 3 Years, By Christy Davis
“The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them,” said Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia. Our Executive Director, Christy Davis, shares her reflections on three years of building and operating a multi-sector partnership hub, where it all began, what we’ve achieved, what she’s learned along the way and whether we’ve proven our hypothesis about multi-sector partnership.
In the beginning, there was an idealistic but thorny idea, a hypothesis that different sectors (civil — public — private) can find shared passion and common ground, sharing core competencies, benefits and risks to build equitable, creative humanitarian and development solutions that produce a multiplier effect for all involved. Indeed, the hypothesis was that different sectors desired to come together, they just needed an invitation, an opportunity, a safe space to meet new people and organisations.
This percolated during my time as a student in Singapore Management University’s unique graduate programme, Master of Tri-Sector Collaboration in 2014–2015. I was working for World Vision International, and my classmates and I were absorbed in our capstone project focused on strengthening the structure around World Vision’s Asia Pacific external engagement work. It subsequently became clear that some kind of construct — and indeed not a system but a more dynamic and less constrained ecosystem — was needed to provide a degree of guidance and systemically encourage new relationships, partnerships and collaboration.
My 2015 final capstone paper included the following: “My vision of this ecosystem is an environment with core guiding principles, transformative in nature, and flexible enough to foster stronger foresight capacity, visible innovation and experimentation. Interactions across internal and external stakeholders will produce new relationships, ideas, solutions, behaviours, outcomes and more… My thinking process first began with the vision of a system, but over time evolved from a system to an ecosystem — a network of closely coordinating but free and independent people moving in the same direction: like a flock of birds, separate, but navigating together and flying close enough to know the flock is flying together.” [C. Davis, “Creating a Public Engagement Ecosystem for World Vision Asia Pacific”, March 30, 2015]
This was a new way of thinking and a new type of operating model for a large international non-governmental organization (NGO): a dedicated venture to bring the different sectors together to co-create market-driven solutions to development and humanitarian problems. With forward-thinking leadership, input and suggestions from many generous people and successful grant support, Asia P3 Hub was born.
Asia P3 Hub, In a Nutshell
Asia P3 Hub (People — Public — Private), hosted by World Vision International, is an open space for multi-sector collaboration. We tackle effects of poverty through partnerships across government, business and civil society to create solutions that multiply resources, break poverty cycles and benefit families and communities. With an initial 3-year focus area on water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), the Hub launched in July 2016 at Singapore International Water Week. Asia P3 Hub is a core team of five, with support from a band of advisors and volunteers who shared the vision and mission for a partnership hub.
What Drives This Partnership Hub Experiment?
Our grand world has become increasingly complex, with grand, dreadful challenges — this we all know. The beautiful Asia Pacific region we call home is the most disaster-prone in the world, bearing the brunt of 70 percent of the world’s natural disasters. It includes 13 of the 30 countries most vulnerable to climate change. While economic growth is vibrant — 2/5 of global economic growth, at a rate of more than 6.5 percent — flourishes here, more than 375 million people live below the poverty line. Prosperity for many, sure, but inequality and economic disparity are rising too. Over a quarter of the region’s population remain economically insecure.
We looked for other examples of a ‘partnership hub’ in Asia but failed to find an innovative, collaboration-focused entity from whom we could learn, benchmark, or replicate their model and good practices. So, we took the nascent, hopeful idea of a hub focused on incubating collaborative ideas and new partnerships wrestling collectively with poverty issues.
The Evolution Of Our Hypothesis
The early hypothesis evolved as we built the hub structure and became operational. Our first two years indicated that many organisations and individuals from government, business and not-for-profit sectors did indeed welcome the opportunity and ‘safe space’ Asia P3 Hub provided for unconventional conversations and meaningful partnerships. After working through our second iteration of our theory of change two years on, we landed a more concrete hypothesis, which is:
Multi-sector partnership can be a vehicle of choice to:
- Provide a frame for unconventional partnerships
- Tackle existing problems in new and sustainable ways
- Wrestle complex issues
- Achieve scalability and generate a multiplier effect
So did we prove this hypothesis? Before I answer that, allow me to share a few more reflections.
The Notion Of Alchemy Is Special
“The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them,” said Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia. If this is true, it means we need to think more expansively and creatively in order to not be confined by our own limitations and capacity constraints. Capacity is defined in many ways: resources like time, money and expertise, the ability to get something done and delivered, or in a technology context the maximum amount of data that can be transferred across network locations.
Today, the power for change in our complex world is harnessing multiple capacities to achieve those grand dreams and indeed, give birth to more. This power for change has a name: combinatorial innovation. It is the alchemy of pooling resources in new, creative, strategic ways that allow our capacities to strengthen one another, and spark solutions we alone could not produce or execute.
Alchemy, a medieval forerunner of chemistry, according to the Oxford Dictionary is concerned with the: “transmutation of matter, in particular with attempts to convert base metals into gold or find a universal elixir.” But further investigation also reveals this definition: “a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination.” And we have found our “magical” process is combinatorial innovation.
Combinatorial Innovation
The ‘secret sauce’ for the Asia P3 Hub model and one of our core values is combinatorial innovation. I first learned about this concept in a 2015 article by sustainability and corporate social responsibility expert John Elkington called “Are we nearly there yet?” It changed my way of thinking about innovation. Before, I interpreted ‘innovation’ as requiring high levels of creativity, original thinking and cleverness. Combinatorial innovation means that each stakeholder brings to the table their unique assets such as technical expertise, industry knowledge, human resources, networks, and financial resources. When combined together in new ways, this co-creation approach can yield innovations to solve existing problems. Elkington wrote, “Instead of breakthrough innovations flowing from individual “Eureka!” moments or single giant leaps, most important innovations are combinatorial, pulling together existing ideas. Think of the jet engine, which combined a compressor with a combustion chamber and a turbine, none of which was new at the time.” The jet engine became our go-to image!
This pooling of resources, assets, technologies, and networks to ‘invent’ something new — is not, disappointingly, actually magical. It requires hard work, intentionality and a commitment to mutual benefit, equity across partners, trust and transparency. But the outcomes of a multiplier effect for impact and lives changed for the better certainly have their magical moments. It’s hard to describe the magic one feels in being part of a transformational solution co-created by government, business and NGOs working together. Solutions like provision of water access in rural areas of Indonesia. Ergen, a 5th grader at Randoria Village Primary School in Ende, Indonesia, said “We used to carry water in jerry cans more than 300 metres for our toilets, but now we have taps in the school. We can also wash our hands.” Or a technology solution for financially marginalised rural populations in Nepal. 55-year-old Narmada Karki, a woman from remote village Phulpingkot, about five hours from Kathmandu, received money directly for the first time in her life for work reconstructing an irrigation canal damaged in the 2015 Nepal earthquake. This is thanks to Sikka, a new blockchain-based application digital asset transfer platform.
Highlights
As a team, what have been collective highlights for us, gleaned over the past three years?
- The power of combinatorial innovation, not just with other partners, but also within the Hub team itself. Both the core team and advisors draw from each other’s diverse strengths to fulfill our mission and embark on what otherwise seems absurd, too complex or unmanageable. Combinatorial innovation reminds us that when we face difficulties trying to do it alone, we draw on the knowledge that every single person involved in the collaboration — especially the problem-owners themselves — can be a contributor, an asset, or a resource to pursuing sustainable solutions. It’s been exciting to take combinatorial innovation from a theoretical concept in a blog to something we’ve seen demonstrated in real life again and again.
- The satisfaction of seeing practical innovation at the base of the pyramid (BoP) or where the community members need it the most, convert into real impact. Innovation is a fluffy thing; how do we apply it, think creatively to produce something different that creates impact for people that are the most vulnerable, trying to break out of the cycle of poverty? Working hand-in-hand with communities and families has provided us the opportunity to experiment and pilot solutions together.
- It’s not just about financial resources, it’s also about time and talent — a vast array of resources are available to be tapped. Engaging different organisations in different ways, and not starting conversations with “how much (funding) do we have?” but “what is the problem we want to solve together — what is the outcome we want to see?” We have seen the power of collective action to build awareness for issues of poverty, advocate for change and co-create solutions.
- The Hub space has allowed us to get ‘inside’ the different sectors — an up close look at how government and businesses (both multinationals and start-ups) operate, what impact investors prioritise, the different ways of working across NGOs and academic institutions — we’ve evolved, grown and adapted our ways of working and communicating to better navigate across the sectors.
Building the Partnering Ecosystem
As we reflect on the past three years, we not only think about what we’ve achieved since launching our Hub, but also how the partnering and collaboration ecosystem has evolved in that time.
The function of an ecosystem is related to the current of energy flow, information and various bits of matter moving and dancing through — and within — the system. Traditional boundaries actually become conduits for shared value interests and opportunities to touch, relate and link up. Multi-sector partnerships are illustrations of this — domains which were once fixed positions between the social, public and private sectors are blurred and overlapping.
The partnering ecosystem in Asia is buzzing, growing and connecting across many dimensions: different sectors, countries, business and industries, and generations. I believe that my early vision of this ecosystem — one “transformative in nature, and flexible enough to foster stronger foresight capacity, visible innovation and experimentation…[and] interactions across internal and external stakeholders will produce new relationships, ideas, solutions, behaviours, outcomes and more…” not only holds true but is evolving and flourishing across the region.
Peter Ho, former head of the Singapore Civil Service, and senior adviser to the Centre for Strategic Futures, once wrote: “Boundaries define the world that we live in…but we often fall into the trap of thinking of a boundary as something that separates one thing from another. In reality, a boundary does not just separate, but also connects, the system to its environment…it is worth recalling what the Renaissance polymath, Leonardo da Vinci, once wrote: “Everything connects to everything else.””[1]
Indeed, in a recent conversation with Singapore-based Stephanie Arrowsmith, Regional Engagement Manager for Second Muse, a global company that focuses on innovation ecosystems and building non-competitive economic partnerships, she observed that: “Singapore is the central node, the heartbeat and the pulse. People pass through Singapore, and it’s become an environment that’s good for both private sector and public sector innovation and different movements of collaborators as well. Over the past 5 years, the partnering ecosystem [in Asia] has grown — there is more involvement and engagement than ever before around tackling issues. Engagement from private sector, public sector and civil society, a confluence of activity across these sectors happening much more intentionally than ever before, and an interest and appetite for working on solutions together… there are vast opportunities; it is navigating the opportunities and finding a good fit between what you can offer and what others can offer as well.”
Back to the Beginning
So back to our hypothesis. Have we proven that multi-sector partnerships can be a vehicle of choice to:
- Provide a frame for unconventional partnerships
- Tackle existing problems in new and sustainable ways
- Wrestle complex issues
- Achieve scalability and generate a multiplier effect?
In three years, we’ve constructed an innovative venture from scratch, something that is rather special given it was built within the borders of a multinational NGO. World Vision was a huge part of our value proposition, providing 60+ years of geographic breadth across Asia Pacific, depth of trusted relationships, diverse networks and access to differentiated expertise.
We’ve forged 25 new partnerships with leading companies worldwide that contribute impact through know-how, gift/services-in-kind and cash.
We’ve directly and indirectly impacted (through partnerships) 72,000 people, 66 percent of whom were children.
We’ve convened 25 events to date, cultivating new awareness and enthusiasm for partnering and collaboration.
We can see, we can feel the potential for collaboration across government, business, non-profit and NGO organisations, the United Nations, and academia. We’ve sailed the ship as we built it, piece-by-piece. We’ve benefited from a ‘coalition of the passionate’ — advisors and champions who shared time, expertise and resources to build the model and pursue the mission. But much is yet to be quantified to be able to say, with confidence, this hypothesis has been proven. Three years on, we’re getting into a rhythm, with trusted relationships, operating models and learning to harness the power of alchemy.
Collective action through multi-sector, multi-stakeholder approaches — and indeed hand-in-hand with the problem-owners themselves — holds promising potential for meaningful, sustainable change at scale. Our organisational and individual ways of thinking and ways of working need to adapt, expand and innovate to enable us to respond to today’s multifaceted challenges. Navigating the complexity of an ever-changing world and finding ways to join forces means developing new skill sets, new mindsets and building new types of relationships.
Pooling our resources and our social capital — moving beyond a zero-sum mentality to one where generosity of spirit produces a multiplier effect for all — is the essence behind all we do at Asia P3 Hub. A common thread is the value of human connection, the value of respectful, thoughtful, helpful points of contact between people of all kinds.
