David Hartley, Commercial & Knowledge Transfer Manager of Oxford Brookes University and PraxisUnico Advocacy Committee member, shares his insights into what make a strong strategic university-business partnership.
Strategic alliances are high on the government’s and funders’ agendas. Significant industrial engagement is often critical to get investment for strategic university projects. Universities and industry have been collaborating for over a century; indeed many of our universities were originally established to address pre-competitive business and industrial questions. Over the last decade there have been a number of reviews calling for more and better university-industry collaboration. But what makes for a good strategic partnership? For me, it can be summarised with these five key factors:
- People: research partnerships are a people business which may be underpinned by legal frameworks and agreements. Like all collaborative partnerships, interactions between universities and businesses work best when both parties are able to invest the necessary resources (largely time) in gaining a mutual understanding of culture, priorities and drivers or KPIs. Professionally skilled technology transfer/knowledge exchange teams can also facilitate relationships which take in to account and reconcile the aims of both academic and commercial interests.
- Willingness to take risks on the demand side: Even in sectors where collaboration is common, such as biotech/pharma, there is a huge difference in companies’ attitude to risk. Generally, better relationships are formed with those that are more willing to take risks.
- A portfolio approach to activities (e.g. research, IP licensing, CPD, student placements): Collaboration isn’t just about money and long-term relationships benefit from several points of engagement between organisations where activities may move at a different pace but ultimately support the same overall goal(s). This engagement should be supported by long-term relationship management to build partnerships over time within and across institutions.
- Flexibility of funding for collaboration: the ability to support small-scale interactions, promote shared cost and risk makes for well-balanced discussions with potential partners. This works with large and small companies / universities.
- Longevity of funding mechanisms: in order to build up expertise in using funding schemes there needs to be greater stability in the funding environment.
Overall, businesses and universities both need greater simplicity and stability in the funding environment in order to take long-term decisions about resourcing partnerships, which may require strategic level decisions, for example to fund research facilities. Clear signposting on the applicability of schemes for different types of collaboration and collaborative partners is also valuable and it is important for funding decisions to be reached quickly; business priorities have often moved on by the time a decision on funding is made.
PraxisUnico's ‘Developing Strategic Partnerships’ course addresses the skills needed to stimulate new business, grow, and maintain strategic alliances between knowledge generators in research organisations and commercial partners, with the next course available to book running on May 21-22.
I would also recommend the many case studies of good practice published online and annually by the National Centre for Universities and Business (NCUB).
Further reading: CBI’s business-university collaboration guide ‘Best of Both Worlds’ Big Innovation Centre’s (BIC) 2013 report ‘Collaborate to Innovate’