Your online learning journey

Designed to build the right partnerships for your business.

Your online learning journey

Designed to build the right partnerships for your business.

Unit 1: Strategic partnerships and ecosystems: introduction

Start the program by recording an individual introduction, formulating your learning objectives and filling in a short survey on your experience in strategic partnerships.
Discover the “Five S” framework for leveraging strategic partnerships.

Unit 2: Strategizing: making the best case to develop partnerships

Examine several examples of traditional companies that have been disrupted by competitors with faster innovation cycles or alternative business models.
Consider how this requires rethinking the use of partnerships.
Apply lessons from Nestlé’s experience of establishing innovation partnerships.

Unit 3: Scouting: finding the right partners

Learn what it takes to search and screen for strategic partnerships by examining the role of Motorola’s corporate venture capital unit.
Determine which skills are needed to make the most of search and screening, and apply the lessons to your own strategic partnership situation.

Unit 4: Structuring: choosing equity vs. non-equity

Study two strategic partnerships in the storage hardware industry and consider the most appropriate equity structure.
Discuss the role of contracts in structuring and running partnerships, including what they should cover and the degree to which they govern the relationship.

Unit 5: Structuring: negotiation approaches to strategic partnerships

Simulate the development of a joint venture and the critical elements that are typically negotiated to make it work.
Determine the best structure for a proposed joint venture.

Unit 6: Structuring: organization & governance for successful partnerships

Reflect on what the organization of a successful strategic partnership should look like and how it should operate, given the needs of the different parties in the relationship.
Study the Electric Green Taxiing System’s approach.

Unit 7: Starting: building a positive momentum of trust

Observe how strategic partnerships are inherently unstable; any wrong move can break trust.
Learn how to kickstart a partnership so that it is on the path of relational trust rather than the wrong path of contractual obligation.

Unit 8: Steering: studying & steering the partnership ecosystem

Understand how many strategic partnerships are managed in an ad hoc manner with no form of learning across the partnerships, yet the management and leadership of strategic partnership activities can be a great source of advantage.
Study a company that has done this well.

Coaching

You will have a dedicated learning coach, making sure you receive a highly individualized learning experience.

Your professional learning coach accompanies you through your 8-week learning journey on this Strategic Partnerships online course. They provide support and feedback as you apply your learning directly into your workplace, where it has an immediate impact.

Their input helps you translate your learning to your particular context. By spreading this feedback regularly throughout the program, you’ll be sure to embed your ongoing learning directly in your daily work.

Your professional learning coach interacts with you via video, in writing, and over the phone. You have calls, spread across the 8-weeks, at intervals that consolidate your learning.