F3: M., Digi
We mostly reuse existing method templates from DigiCampus, adapting them where needed. A hackathon, for example, isn’t a new concept — we use it as a tool to move things forward. Designing entirely new methods isn’t the current focus. If something new emerges naturally, we’d want to capture it, but we’re not actively pursuing it. That’s partly because it’s not a priority, and partly a capacity issue — we don’t have as many innovation facilitators as we’d like, so there simply isn’t room for it right now. about using alkemio: We
could also set up Alkemio better to create more engagement/community; now it’s used very functionally. Handling
meetings takes a lot of time: preparation, the meeting itself, and follow-up—preparation and follow-up can take longer than the meeting. emails sometimes trigger a wave of replies about wording or intent, and email isn’t great for resolving that since input comes in one at a time. Part of the reason is that written agreements feel more binding than verbal ones — once it’s on paper, people want the wording to be exactly right, which can lead to backtracking or clarifications.
F4: M., Digi-ICTU
There are clear peak moments in terms of workload — midterm reviews and end-of-program reporting, for instance, where you have to deliver reports, financial overviews, and presentations to the European Commission. Those are administratively intense, and good templates would help enormously. But they often don’t exist, so everyone ends up making their own — which shows. A tool meant to create alignment in the consortium was the “mini-contract” — a canvas mapping partners to objectives. In practice, it created more confusion than clarity. It was treated as a required deliverable rather than a genuine alignment tool, never really discussed, and never revisited. Most people, myself included, didn’t fully understand it.
F5: A., PBA
Partners change over time, and that’s something many organizations overlook — they write open-ended contracts when they should be time-bound or tied to specific objectives. That way, when a more relevant partner comes along, or when the work is done, you can part ways without animosity while keeping the relationship intact. What’s still missing is a smarter way to scope for partners. If you have clear criteria for what you’re looking for, being able to quickly identify the most relevant organisations is a real gap — and one where AI and new technology could make a meaningful difference.
F6: A., Signalen - VNG
Sharing within the community skews towards successes and practical questions rather than failures, though people are generally open about things that aren’t working well. There’s no structured way of capturing lessons learned, and I’d actually like to know more about how community members experience the collaboration — what they feel is missing, what they’d want to see more of — but I wouldn’t know how to organise that right now.
F7: L., PBA
1)A clear timeline would be helpful as well, with phases of the project. Some don’t like to talk about the deadlines, because they only want to talk about the nice things. The cost of the ‘free’ benefits, is the data. You should have these conversations at the beginning; set expectations and discuss how the data comes in, how we will prove that we’ve done what we said we would do and work this out together.
- In a partnership it is not that everyone’s going after a single goal, but actually everyone is still holding on to their individual reasons for being in the partnership. If one of the partners is not achieving its own goals, they start to question why they are in the partnership. So keeping track of your partners means keeping track of each organization’s kind of wins against what they all together want to achieve. Insights in this would be very useful to see if there is a partner not getting as much out of the collaboration as everybody else. Helps to see where to put time and attention in order to prevent them to pull away. Now she does this by personally checking in, but that becomes hard if the partnerships are larger and these questions focus on worries and needs, might still lack overview of progress on their goals (compared to other partner goals).
F8: A.
On repetitive tasks where software could help: meeting preparation is an obvious one — briefing participants, maintaining a track record, handling logistics. And more broadly, being able to access how something was done before — even just a few lines left by a predecessor — is enormously valuable and almost never exists.
F9: J., Novum
The Innovation Designer explicitly mentions one area for improvement: better retention and accessibility of lessons learned from previous projects. He describes how valuable knowledge is currently lost when experienced team members leave, and how it is difficult to find and understand what has been done before.