Objectives
Partnerships
The Partnerships objective helps teams identify companies with evidence of mutual fit, define what they can credibly create or deliver together, and understand which capabilities or relationships are missing from their wider ecosystem.
Selecting Partnerships does not create a separate understanding of a company. It changes what ASUME evaluates and which outputs it produces from the maintained understanding.
What Partnerships evaluates
How ASUME applies Partnerships
Maintained understanding → Partnerships → Partnerships outputs
ASUME forms a structured understanding of your company and potential partners: what each company offers, which needs it addresses, which audiences it serves, what capabilities it lacks, and what it may gain from working with another organization.
It then evaluates the relationship from both directions. A partnership cannot succeed when its value exists for only one side.
Capabilities
Partner Search
A good partner is not simply a company in an adjacent category. It is a company with which your organization can create a defensible form of mutual value.
Every candidate should answer two separate questions: why is this company useful to us, and why would we be useful to this company. If the second question cannot be answered, the candidate is not yet a strong partnership opportunity.
Example: A multilingual content platform is considering a digital agency as a partner. The agency serves international retailers and has strong campaign expertise but relies on external suppliers for multilingual production. Both sides contribute a capability the other needs.
Joint Plays
Finding a compatible company does not define what the partnership should do. A joint play describes the need being addressed, the contribution of each company, the audience that benefits, the way value will be delivered, and the intended outcome.
ASUME evaluates how the companies' capabilities fit together and where duplication, conflict, dependency, or weak incentives may exist. Joint plays should be designed around the specific relationship rather than copied across every company in the ecosystem.
Example: A cybersecurity platform and an incident-response consultancy identify a joint play for regulated companies. The platform provides continuous monitoring; the consultancy provides investigation and executive response.
Ecosystem Gap
Even when individual partnerships are valuable, the network may still contain important gaps. Ecosystem Gap examines the combined capabilities of your company and its partners.
The purpose is not to maximize the number of partners. It is to build the smallest useful network capable of addressing the intended market need with clear roles and limited unnecessary overlap.
Example: A company has partners for software implementation, cloud infrastructure, and customer support. Ecosystem Gap shows that the combined network cannot help customers demonstrate regulatory compliance, so the next search can be specific.
Workflows
Partner identification
Partner Search identifies companies with evidence of mutual fit. A newly identified ecosystem gap can initiate another search.
The result is not a guarantee that two companies will cooperate. It is a reasoned explanation of why a relationship deserves investigation.
Ecosystem strategy
Joint Plays transforms that fit into a specific plan for creating and distributing value. Ecosystem Gap shows how each relationship contributes to the wider network and what remains missing.
The addition of a new partner can alter the role or value of existing relationships.
Extending Partnerships
ASUME is expanding the Partnerships objective across additional workflows and developer interfaces. These extensions are planned.