The Asia Public-Private-Partnerships Incubation Hub (Asia P3 Hub) was launched in on July 11, at Singapore International Water Week. The Asia P3 Hub is a cross-sector incubator, based in Singapore and hosted by World Vision International (WVI), that facilitates conversation and collaboration across multi-national companies, social enterprises, government, academia and non-profit organizations.
The hub brings together public and private sectors to facilitate market-driven solutions for development and humanitarian opportunities. It is visualised as a “shared platform for co-creation to encourage fresh thinking, explore and test new ideas, and formulate new business opportunities which contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals.” With an initial focus on water, the hub will foster innovative, strategic, mutually-beneficial partnerships, producing measurable solutions to address key challenges within the scope of water, sanitation and hygiene, all of which present opportunities for innovative partnership solutions across the Asia region.
Over the past few months, alongside the project launch, Crazy About Water and The Partnering Initiative have led a Market Research and Scoping Study for the P3 Hub. The aim of the research was to set the strategic priorities in terms of geographic focus, technical water sectors, services offered and underlying operating model. Based on the research, the hub identified two groups of countries as strategic geographic priorities for the initial three-year pilot period (September 2016 to June 2019). Tier One includes India, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Tier Two includes Bangladesh, Cambodia, and the Philippines. The pilot phase will focus on four priority sectors: water supply, sanitation, hygiene behavior change, and environmental hygiene.
The scoping report maps out how the Asia P3 Hub will work to “build shared value partnerships, cluster investments and provide scaling opportunities into the region for field testing solutions.” According to Frodo van Oostveen (Crazy About Water) and Todd Kirkbride (TPI), who jointly led the Market Survey and Scoping, one key element that makes the Hub different from others is that, aspiring to provide open collaboration across all sectors, it “espouses a core value of “combinatorial innovation” (combining existing components to create a new solution)” and “connects the (existing) dots – avoiding re-inventing the wheel – and focuses on a business approach to make a sustainable impact for people in need of water throughout Asia Pacific.”
The co-creation workshop formats that informed the business model development will be transformed into ‘combinatorial innovation and design labs’ in which the Asia P3 Hub will focus on generating new types of market-driven solutions and collaborations addressing real in-country problems. The Asia P3 Hub will be hosting its first Innovation Lab in late October 2016.
The Asia P3 Hub began operations in September 2016 and already more than 400 organizations and individuals have been engaged in this process and want to remain in touch for the journey. Watch that space!
For further information on the Hub:
Read the full report
Check out the Hub Facebook page
Have a look at the hub’s useful infographic
Watch the launch video
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