Partnership

Without a more systematice and comprehensive approach to evaluating cross-sector partnerships, further investment in the development and implementation of partnership approaches is likely to be curtailed in coming years. This is because the effectiveness and desirability of the cross-sector partnership approach is likely to be judged not just in relation to the impact of well-designed and well-run partnerships, but on the results of a myriad of initiatives and activities labelled as partnerships. Many of these underperform and do not achieve what is expected of them because they are badly conceived or poorly implemented. This is why more emphasis needs now to be placed on evaluation of the performance, effectiveness and impact of cross-sector partnerships.  With this motivation in mind, The Partnering Initiative (TPI) canvassed the views of partnership practitioners on current practice through a combination of desk research, literature review, questionnaire surveys and face-to-face interviews sought to answer the following quesitons: (1) DEFINITIONS: is there a consensu on the terminology related to evaluating cross-sector partnerships? FINDING - there is no consensus both within and across civil society, business and public sectors as to definitions as to what constitutes "evaluation" and what does not. A variety of terms are used including evaluation, tracking, assessing, monitoring, reviewing with no consistency of terminology; (2) ASPECTS OF EVALUATION: Which aspects of of partnering are considered to be the most important in evaluations of cross-sector partnerships? FINDING - The focus on 'producing tangible results' or assessing impacts dominates current practice in evaluating cross-sector partnership performance. More intangible or unexpected outcomes resulting from cross-sector partnering are not well addressed and are often ignored altogether. Partnership performance is seldom monitored and evaluated in relation to the potential advantages or benefits, which can be achieved. (3) PLANNING EVALUATION: In what ways do partnership practitioners plan to evaluate their partnerships and what is the focus of such evaluations? FINDING - Few cross-sector partnerships are subjected to formal evaluation. Of these only a minority are evaluated in a systematic or comprehensive way in terms of their overall performance and impact. Alternatives to partnership approaches are seldom considered in evaluations. Most partnerships are evaluated from the perspective of one of the partners in relation to financial investement and related reputation risks/benefits. (4) TOOLS: What tools are used for evaluating cross-sector partnerships? FINDING - Evaluations ofr cross-sector partnerships most commonly rely on judgement of specialist consultants, who make use of a wide range of specialised tools, frameworks, techniques and approaches. There is no single most favoured or accepted tool, framework or approach. Evaluators opt for the evaluation tools, which are most appropriate or relevant to meeting the needs, circumstances, purposes and organizational cultures of specific sectors. Frameworks and tools are typically selected by the agency, partner funding or commissioning the evaluation; (5) IMPROVING EVALUATION: What are the most important barriers to improving evaluations of cross-sector partnerships? FINDING - The most frequently cited barrirer to undertaking evaluations of cross sector partnerships relates to securing adequate resources. The availability of resources is closely related to the way evaluations are organised and carried out. In other words, who decides on their scope, who funds them, who carries them out and who uses and  interprets the results are crucial questions that must be dealt with by the partners working together in a cross-sector partnership. A key aspiration for partnership practitioners relates to finding ways of designing evaluations of cross-sector partnerships as a whole in ways, which draw on or include all partners, as well as those who have been affected by the activities of the partnership. The aspiration isn this regard is to ensure evaluation results contribute to improving partnership performance and impact.

Providing a broad engineering education has become an enormous challenge. Engineering is derived from the basic sciences of physics and chemistry using tools provided by mathematics. With a broad high level introduction an engineer can move to any specialization. We believe that a solution to improving engineering education is to coordinate core engineering courses, calculus, differential equations, physics, chemistry, introductory engineering, materials science, and computer programming so that they support each other. Prince George's Community College has taken a first step in building such a curriculum by creating a new, one semester General Chemistry course specifically designed for engineers. Our collaborators at Howard University have helped in providing an open, online accompanying textbook through the LibreTexts project. Introductory courses are typically taught in isolation of one another without the interconnecting threads that bind topics in different courses together. Community colleges can be less influenced by departmental limits than universities. This freedom allows for greater opportunity for innovation.

Although current academic thinking tells us that private equity investors are generally passive in the management of funds, Chinese private equity market is dominated by funds whose investors are relatively active. The interference of limited partners in a fund's management triggers internal confl icts between partners. This article examines the legal and practical reasons for this phenomenon. Based on extensive interviews with market participants, it is found that the agency problems, the legal weaknesses of limited partners under Chinese law and several regulatory constraints on China's private equity industry have infl uenced the decisions of investors to pursue active strategies in funds. This article also examines the effectiveness of the control rule and a few of the common private contractual arrangements in addressing the agency problem in the context of Chinese private equity funds, and suggests strategies to mitigate the problem.

This work explores the dynamics of public-private interaction for knowledge generation and diffusion among R&D laboratories and companies in Argentina. Based on a case study method, we qualitatively analyzed four public-private consortiums in the field of agricultural biotechnology. The study allowed us to identify several factors that favor good partnership performance. Some of them promote relationships between researchers and stakeholders in the industry; there are also channels and mechanisms that facilitate the processes under study, and factors that enable participants to get results and positive return of investments. We also observed the renewed participation of certain employers and the remarkable role of human resource with knowledge translation capabilities.