Consultancy – Innovation Toolkit Development for Vietnam Innovation Incubator

Background

SNV Netherlands Development Organisation is a non-profit, international development organisation founded 50 years ago, and now operating in 38 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Our global team of local and international advisors use their expertise in Agriculture, Renewable Energy, Climate Change and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene to contribute to solving some of the leading problems facing the world today. We work with local partners to equip communities, businesses and organisations with the tools, knowledge and connections they need to increase their incomes and gain access to basic services – empowering them to break the cycle of poverty and guide their own development.

SNV has been working in Vietnam since 1995, and currently has over 80 national and international staff. SNV Vietnam’s team works hand-in-hand with communities, government agencies and businesses, in some of the remotest and poorest areas of the country, to strengthen their capacity to effectively reduce poverty. SNV Vietnam operates from a head office in Hanoi and is present in more than 50 out of 63 provinces in Vietnam.

For decades, SNV has developed and leveraged market-based solutions and innovations to accelerate economic development opportunities for the low-income segment. SNV developed and pioneered the Inclusive Business (IB) approach as a comprehensive pro-poor market-based solution developed with the direct participation of the private sector stakeholders, including an alliance with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) since 2006.

To date, SNV has successfully supported approximately 200 inclusive business endeavours (with both MNCs and domestic companies) in sectors such as agribusiness, mobile banking, energy, tourism, infrastructure and basic services, health, ICT, renewable energy, textiles and others. SNV’s IB offering was developed with the private sector market as the client for revenue generation in mind, however we have also applied our methodology to work with donors and NGOs interested in developing public-private partnerships.

In Vietnam, SNV manages two large donor-funded inclusive business programmes, the Vietnam Business Challenge Fund (VBCF, www.vbcf.org.vn) and the Inclusive Business Accelerator (IBA, https://iba.ventures/), both of which focus on helping SMEs operating in Vietnam design and implement business plans, bring like-minded business partners and investors together and deliver economic and social impact at scale.

Under the auspices of the IBA program, SNV and its Vietnamese partners are now developing the Vietnam Innovation Incubator (V2I). It is a hybrid incubator, accelerator and research lab for food value chains in the Red River Delta which works to address local enterprises’ needs for access to new and relevant technology for highly value-added processing and production of high quality products, access to financing for technology transfer and innovation in Vietnam, as well as access to international markets. V2I will provide one-stop-shop services to comprehensively cater to innovative growing SMEs and start-ups in the food value chain throughout the Red River Delta region.

V2I is supported in part with funding from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Innovation Partnership Program (IPP) of the Governments of Finland and Vietnam. We are seeking an experienced consultancy firm or individual(s) to advance its offering as detailed below.

Objectives & Scope of Work

Under the supervision of and with the direct support of the IBA Vietnam Program Manager:

1. Develop, design and test a toolkit to support the innovation process and the V2I.
2. Support in training consultants in using the toolkit for their support to ventures.
3. The toolkit should include 5 tools as the following

• Innovation process management: The tool helps consultants and ventures to effectively manage the innovation process in a cost and time efficient manner. The stage-gate models follows the process of Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver. The tool provides guidelines for which type of questions to address at what time, and what indicators can support the decision making in advancing the innovation.
• Prototyping is a way of making imitations and working models of the product or service and testing it with customers before company actually take it to market. A prototype can be a rough approximation of a product or service or can be more refined and similar to a finished product. The venture can prototype anything from a service model to an electronic device, in forms ranging from a simple napkin sketch to an elaborate 3D-printed working model.
• Piloting: A pilot is the first stage of the implementation of an innovation; it is the first time that the innovation becomes operational in the market. Its preliminary purpose is to proof that the innovation has potential to succeed on a full-scale basis. To reduce the investments, risks and allow for flexibility in refining the system a pilot is typically limited in geography, budget, target group, scale or scope.
• Legal Diagnostic: The tool facilitates enterprises´quest to gain judicial understanding and determine which regulations have implications on their operations. It specifically aids in selecting, prioritizing and mapping concrete action for relevant areas needing attention. It also allows the enterprise to figure out which legal issues it can handle internally and which ones require external legal advisory and support
• Finance for Innovation: The tool helps to assess the risk of innovation products/services. It also supports the matchmaking process and the decision making on which financial instruments and investors are most suitable.

Each tool will include the description and how to use it

Deliverables

• A toolkit with five tools include description and how to use it
• A workshop for testing and training the consultants.

Time Frame

The duration of this engagement is expected to be 3 months from October 2015 to December 2015.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated track record in toolkit development with innovation and inclusive business;
• Good understanding of private sector development and concept of impact incubator/accelerator; 
• Good understanding of field realities in emerging markets; ability to link different sectors (private sector, government and NGOs);
• Good understanding of food value chain will be an advantage.

Proposals

Consultancy firms or individual consultant(s) are invited to submit a competitive proposal for this assignment, including:

• Brief technical proposal to conduct the assignment (understanding, team structure and profiles, summary approach, and draft work plan should be included);
• Brief financial proposal;
• Relevant qualifications and past experience.

Please submit your proposals and questions to Mr Phat Nguyen, Manager of IBA program at [email protected] and copy Ms Quyen Nguyen, Program Assistant of IBA program at [email protected]. Proposals must be received by Oct 28, 2015. Only short-listed applicants will be contacted.

SNV Netherlands Development Organisation
Address: La Thanh Hotel, 218 Doi Can Street, Ba Dinh, Ha Noi, Vietnam
Tel:        84 43 8463 791/2
Fax:       84 43 8463 794