Business and management consultancy and related services

Tender description

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is an independent, non-departmental public body, bringing together the seven Research Councils, Innovate UK and Research England. Operating across the whole of the UK and with a combined budget of more than GBP 6 billion, UK Research and Innovation represents the largest reform of the research and innovation funding landscape in the last 50 years. UK Research and Innovation ensures the UK maintains its world-leading position in research and innovation. This is done by creating the best environment for research and innovation to flourish. UK Shared Business Services (UK SBS) on behalf of UKRI is seeking to secure a partner to establish and deliver a Community of Practice (CoP) which supports the Healthy Ageing Challenge participants through an environment of peer support and active learning. UK Shared Business Services (UK SBS) on behalf of UKRI is seeking to secure a partner to establish and deliver a Community of Practice (CoP) which supports the Healthy Ageing Challenge participants through an environment of peer support and active learning. The Healthy Ageing Challenge is a GBP 98 million investment to enable businesses, including social enterprises, to develop and deliver products, services and business models that will be adopted at scale which support people as they age. This will allow people to remain active, productive, independent and socially connected across generations for as long as possible. The CoP will be responsible for sharing learnings between challenge participant organisations, identifying and overcoming common barriers, enabling collaboration between organisations and supporting the challenge in scaling and spreading ideas and good practice from the challenge to a wider interested audience. The objectives of the CoP are to: • accelerate the pace of proposition development by identifying and overcoming common barriers and through the sharing of lessons learned; • generate insights that enable the spread of ideas, products, services and processes to other sectors and audiences; • support the challenge in identifying what is most effective in contributing to healthy ageing, by making appropriate links from the emerging findings of Trailblazers with a wider evidence base within the research community and across the other challenge activities; and to • enable the creation of new collaborations and partnerships where there is the potential to increase the collective impact of a set of complementary activities. In order to deliver on these objectives, the community will need to be robustly co-designed with its members and ensure that it embeds best practice principles for effective active learning networks, ensuring that the community of practice is: • accessible — allowing access to any individual who has a need to share and learn with the group regardless of their location or role; • relevant — sharing content which addresses and satisfies the needs of members; • flexible — adapting the focus and delivery approach of the community as projects mature and the needs of members change; • honest — enabling an open environment where members are comfortable to share lessons from threats and challenges, as well as from successes; and • regular — delivering a regular programme of activities to ensure engagement with the community is maintained throughout the lifecycle of the challenge. Two features of the challenge which have implications on the way that the community of practice should be setup are the high degree of heterogeneity of projects and the potential diversity of partners within consortia which will be supported through the Trailblazers. Market engagement conducted in March 2019 suggested around half of the potential bids would involve consortia with 10 or more members. Results from the engagement also demonstrated variance in the focus of propositions across all seven themes of the healthy ageing challenge framework and also by the type of proposition, with a mix of those with a place-based population focus and those seeking to demonstrate single solution propositions. Successful bidders for the CoP will need to demonstrate: • significant depth of experience of working on programmes related to healthy age; • experience facilitating active learning networks, particularly within communities where there are high degrees of heterogeneity, large numbers of consortia and a wide geographical spread; • a breadth of appropriate capabilities for supporting organisations through the common challenges associated with developing, and taking to market, new service propositions for older people; • access to a broader network of the wider relevant capabilities needed to deliver a successful community.