When funding calls open and the consortium gears kick into action, there is a lot of excitement mixed with uncertainty and risk. Consortiums do not come fully formed, and risk is not just isolated to new technologies or organisational challenges. It is a combination of both and also includes other factors, such as regulation, ability of organisations to collaborate, global phenomenon, ships getting stuck in major trade arteries and so on. Spinverse's Patrick Halford, VP, Digital Industries discusses on how to manage consortium risk and how Spinverse can help.
Risk tolerance can also be relative to an individual organisation. A risk to me may not be a risk to you. Risk can be also be mitigated by creating new value chains and partnerships - that is the part of the puzzle that we focus on solving in Spinverse.
The Spinverse approach is to rapidly reduce the level of Innovation risk in the call proposal, while maximising its impact for all partners involved.
You can think of the process from the inception of the funding call as a type of funnel where a pipeline of focused ideas and partners enter the process and we rapidly iterate through our proven lifecycle approach.
Building the consortium around a strong coordinator is key and it helps to crystallise the early stages of the concept and reduce the number of chicken-and-egg cycles that are common when building a consortium.
In many cases, partners make decisions to join a consortium based on the strength of the partners already signed up and the level of clarity of the core idea. It enables potential new partners to understand what they could bring to the consortium, and the value chain opportunity offered to them by combining with existing partners. Naturally, scope needs to be carefully managed and potential new capabilities brought by new partners needs to compliment the sum. The details in the funding proposal text should always be our North star.
Because Spinverse experts are skilled at conceptualising how the potential technologies and business model puzzle can evolve, we are able to help quickly articulate this and finalise the remaining partners. Once this happens, the process of proposal development accelerates and takes on greater granularity.
One of the other key things to remember is that partners from different types of organisations run at different clock speeds. RTOs, universities, corporates, SMEs and startups all have different constraints on their time, resources and measurement systems. Spinverse understands these challenges well, and we are able to create seamless value chains between the partners across the various use cases and work package structures in the consortium.
We also have deep insights to how converging, exponential technologies are likely to accelerate development up the relevant TRL (Technology Readiness Level) scales as the project progresses. Keeping up with, and identifying what will be beyond the state-of-the-art, is one of the reasons why we tap our vast partner networks, internal technological insights, and of course our Spinbase tool.
Through rapid ideation, focused workshops and clearly defined path through the proposal cycle, we fuse the technological, organisational and business model outcomes, building a solid implementation plan, anchored by high excellence and strong complimentary consortium, essentially minimising risk and maximising impact.
Would you like to learn more about this topic?
Our experts Patrick, Eeva Viinikka and Risto Savolainen held a consortium building webinar on 25 March, 2021. View the webinar here if you are interested to get their tips and tricks.
