Baby Steps: Making Public-Private Partnerships Work

Thanks to BIF Research Advisor Larry Huston for spending some quality time with me last week. As I sit here preparing the output from our conversation to share with the BIF community, I'm reminded of a reference he made to a Wall Street Journal article about public/private partnerships and what it takes to make them successful. It comes down to baby steps.

Here at BIF, we've set ourselves up with a hefty goal to transform how value is delivered across several key sectors of the economy-from education to healthcare to public security. According to Huston, the end result may indeed be transformational, but it's important to begin on a small scale.

"Begin by jumping on the learning curve," said Huston. "Get a few people trained to translate the program into briefs and actionable targets. Then get in touch with other people who might solve the problem, find a way to interact with them, share in the rewards and launch into marketplace. Then reap the success, re-do the cycle and continue to scale it up, up, up until you have something big and important happening. But always start small."

Must be human nature, but most people don't have the intuitive sense to start small and they certainly don't have the patience for baby step building blocks . But Huston's successful Connect & Develop innovation program did not happen overnight. It was years in the making before the program officially launched in 2001. And it's been years of learning and growing before his story was ready for primetime.

Getting back to the Wall Street Journal article, Cincinnati has developed a program called Every Child Succeeds. In the seven counties around the city, 8.3 out of every 1,000 newborns die before they reach their first birthday. For the group of mothers part of Every Child, the mortality rate is 2.8.

From the article:

(The program) is built on a tough, corporate model inspired by a former chief of one of America's most successful companies, Cincinnati's Procter & GAmble. Every Child, a partnership of public and private groups, has relatively narrow goals and is run to produce specific results -- rarities in the world of government-run health services. All told, it suggests a new way to reduce America's infant-mortality rate.

The point of babysteps is not just about starting small. There are many examples of small, inspiring and successful programs across the country. To Larry's point, it's also about having the ability to scale-up, on a repeated basis, until one day, you can look back, without hype, and describe your efforts as 'transformational'.

And that's the value of organizations like BIF. By leveraging Rhode Island's size and densely connected networks, we provide the platform for scalability. Our members easily reach a diverse population of just over one million within a footprint of a thousand square miles. We provide streamlined access to government, community, academic, and industry leaders.The potential for national and global expansion starts here.

Enough of the soapbox. Proof is in the 'do'. And you can check out what we're up to here.