Collaborating for Public Value

Program Overview

The public and private sectors often do their best work together. To drive change for your organizations or communities, your best bet can be cross-sectoral collaboration. Harvesting collaboration’s benefits, though, means navigating risks, hazards, and complexity. Collaborating for Public Value, an online executive education program chaired by Harvard Kennedy School faculty Jack Donahue and Matt Andrews, equips you for the full lifecycle of collaboration—from deciding when working together beats acting alone, to crafting effective structures, to overcoming the complications of government–business and government–civil society relationships.

Professors Jack Donahue and Matt Andrews are particularly well positioned to guide practitioners through these cross-sector relationships, and you’ll learn from their expertise over the course of five transformative weeks. You will gain practical tools for alignment, accountability, adaptive management, and building durable collaborative capacity across diverse institutional environments. Through the power of productive collaboration, cross-sector relationships can leverage each sector’s strengths to maximize public value.

Format

The program is five weeks long. Each week, there will be independent asynchronous work (approximately 3 hours per week) and one live session on Thursdays at 10:00 am ET.

Learning Objectives

This program will empower you with the skills needed to collaborate across sectors, including how to:  

• Make strategic collaborative decisions. Recognize the two main forms of collaboration--contracting and partnership--and determine when each model is the best fit with the mission and the context.
• Build collaborative capacity. Recognize what your organization needs to be good at to launch and sustain value-creating relationships with contractors and partners.  
• Design and structure effective collaborations. Create the roles, rules, and structures that let you maximize the payoffs of the collaborative approach and that ensure sustainable, long-term success.  
• Manage risks and ensure accountability. Identify key risks and implement processes to maintain performance, transparency, and trust.
• Lead and adapt collaborative initiatives. Apply adaptive management practices to navigate complexity, respond to change, and improve outcomes.