Writing a project, going through specific applications, project designers “always” can find a box dedicated to the partnership composition. “Always”, or, at least, very often, applications ask for “criteria” followed in the creation of the partnership. For sure, the creation of valuable Consortium is so important as the design of an innovative idea itself, to have a challenging project at the end. Some criteria should be followed building a partnership, i.e., the so-called complementarity and expertise. It means to involve as full partners organizations with “complementary” expertise in a field of intervention, so that those phenomena or needs, to which the under-development project aims at finding an answer, might be faced through different perspectives. For example, in a project focused on fighting unemployment, complementary organizations could be, respectively: VET providers (Training centres, Universities), able to bring in the partnership their expertise in designing, developing and delivering updated training programmes for upskilling and reskilling; Business Support Organizations, companies, Public or private Employment Services/Agencies, that can directly bring their view and expertise in terms of skills and competences needs on the labour market; public administration (regional, national), responsible for implementation of policies and measures and able to create conditions to upscale a practice from piloting to a systematic level. The “expertise criterium” also refers to previous managed projects in the field at a different level (local, regional, national, international) and the existence of a meaningful background in terms of activities, networking, and available skills , thanks to staff members. A further criterium can be geographical distribution: this recalls concepts as “representativeness”, “democracy”, “cultural differences and peculiarities”. In short, the importance of listening to different voices and of looking at phenomena from different angles. Again, another criterium to consider, should be necessarily, to have in the partnership organizations acting at a different level, from local to international. This allows to generate stronger and long-lasting impacts during and over the project’s life, maximizing the possibilities to capitalize results and deliverables, to spread them behind the initial partnership and to reinforce knowledge sharing processes. The idea is basically that phenomena are global or, better, glocal and new solutions ask for a multilevel governance.
Besides, these above-mentioned criteria and “technicalities”, let us say, what is crucial in building valuable and successful partnerships is the everyone’s commitment in implementing the project’s activities and in meeting its main objectives and expected results. Implementing a complex project is a joint enterprise, a sort of a team game where everyone has to play roles and responsibilities to generate benefits for all, target groups of course and, finally, project’ partners as well!