Swapping control for trust, collaboration and the best people

Social Area Library Basement City Campus West Northumbria University

'Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust'

Warren Bennis

In giving up some direct influence the most important reciprocal gain is achieving greater flexibility on who to use for which roles, and how, and the ability to fine-tune their incentives (and the greater flexibility on when they leave). Ultimately, trust is key in the engagement of any external party. 'Trust' is identified as one of five critical success factors for Open Innovation in the PERA report produced for JISC: Facilitating Open Innovation Landscape and Scoping Study (2009).

Trust is crucial to the move from 'Command and Control leadership' to 'Collaborative Leadership' required if organisations are going to be open to external innovation. The report usefully breaks down trust into its concrete components, and paraphrasing these are:

Do I have faith in the competence of a collaborator - can they do as they say?
Do I understand their objectives, and are our objectives aligned?
Can I ensure that they will not rip me off, or disclose my IP?

Luckily, the KT 2.0 process addresses the core issues for ensuring trust. The prior use and qualification for individual entrepreneur consultants via a network of networks allows for the informal ranking of individuals based on three components:

technical capability relating to the project
provision of feedback mechanisms to increase confidence in users' ability based upon past experience
(and indirectly) the assessment of personality and collaborative ability (without going to the extent of the inclusion of third party analysis of personality, recommended by PERA).

The ability to choose to deploy individuals that have been tested, and are trusted by other KTOs is critical to the process.

Moreover there is clear evidence of a correlation between greater numbers of market transactions and levels of trust, and greater autonomy requires high levels of trust. So even before setting rules, the best guard against problems is engaging the right people and doing the necessary 'due diligence' (DD) on them - and using the experience of other universities in this respect is a quick and effective proxy test.

Setting the Rules of Play

Even with the right entrepreneur or consultant in the game, they still need to understand the rules and the process. Moreover, on occasions it will be the case that certain projects will require the identification of a very specific skill set, and that the engagement of a specific (rare) person for whom such a proxy is not available. Then the best option is to set the ground rules clearly and this needs to be set early and formalised. Be prepared to get it wrong from time to time but it will be easier to resolve.

Much of this section is devoted to the details of these rules and a section of this resource has been produced in a style that can readily be downloaded and emailed or given to prospective consultants. Ideally, they can even be uploaded to your version of the Innovation Community. This is what the Universities of Leeds, York, Oxford Brookes and Portsmouth have done, or are in the process of doing. Hence the tone is equally directed at prospective consultants.

Establishing the Right Ethos

Not every scenario will lend itself to interpretation by rules. Knowledge transfer and commercialisation is too complicated a process for that. At the core of any outsourced approach has to be the constant theme of: 'how do we reduce the transaction costs?' General template rules help to the extent that each consultant (or investor) does not haggle a new set of rules each time, but even so, the complexity suggests that a good, simple and clear description of the ethos on which it is expected that collaboration should take place is extremely valuable. So the section on The Rules of the Game, which is recommended to be shared with collaborators, starts with a suggestion as to some principles that may help encapsulate that right ethos.