Enabler 2:
Partnership & Collaboration
Purpose
To build trusted, values-led partnerships that enable innovative and impactful research collaboration, advance equitable knowledge creation, and mobilise the skills, tools, and structures needed to deliver societal and economic benefit for diverse communities locally and globally.
Purpose
Partnership and collaboration – both within the University and with external organisations – are the cornerstone of our research and innovation mission. They are essential for delivering innovative, disruptive, and impactful research that addresses complex challenges.
Aligned with our Partnership Principles, we build trust and lasting relationships with organisations of all types and sizes. Our goal is to maximise the societal and economic impact of our research while supporting our partners’ innovation journeys.
To achieve this, we will empower our research community by providing the skills, tools, and structures needed to develop strong external partnerships. This external engagement is fuelled by robust, interdisciplinary collaboration within the University, which breaks down organisational silos and allows us to proactively seize strategic opportunities.
Priority Activities
Cultivating Strategic Funder Partnerships
Building influential relationships with strategic funders and government to position ourselves as a trusted partner through specialised expertise to mobilise and maximise the impact of these critical partnerships. Our enabling actions include:
1. Leveraging Strategic Partnerships: Deepening existing collaborations whilst scoping and establishing new, strategically aligned partnerships across government, funders, industry and the wider economy to position Exeter as a leading voice that shapes national and global funding agendas.
2. Strategic Funder Engagement: Actively shape and co-create funder and government agendas by focusing on priority funders, aligning and amplifying institutional messages, and equipping researchers with shared intelligence for proactive, coordinated engagement.
Facilitating Global Academic Partnerships
Global partnerships enable research and innovation by providing access to international expertise, infrastructure, and funding, supporting large-scale and interdisciplinary activity, and positioning Exeter to engage proactively with global research opportunities aligned to our Global Strategy 2030. Our enabling actions include:
1. Pursuing International Funding: Actively engaging with multilateral and bilateral research funding opportunities, whilst prioritising EU schemes.
2. Aligning Collaborations with Strategy: Leveraging our Global Strategy 2030 to forge research partnerships that tackle global challenges and align with our institutional strengths and funding objectives.
3. Amplifying Our Impact: Utilising our global networks to celebrate research discoveries, demonstrate their positive real-world change, and attract talented students and researchers to Exeter.
4. Championing Equitable Partnerships: Enacting our commitment to equity by ensuring all partnerships reflect our core values and dedication to a sustainable and socially just future.
Strategic Non-academic Partnerships
Partnerships across industry, government, and the third sector enable research and innovation by connecting multidisciplinary teams to shared assets and pathways for co-creating solutions to real-world challenges. Our enabling actions include:
1. Corporate Partner Approach: Delivering a sector leading approach to management of our Corporate Partners ensuring clarity of offer, an institutional approach to partner engagement, and the development of more strategic and high value collaborations.
2. Global Hubs: Strengthening global engagement by aligning Transnational Education (TNE) partnerships and global industry partners with research collaboration opportunities, enabling deeper and more sustainable international research relationships.
3. Building Capacity: Providing the skills, knowledge, and structures that enable interdisciplinary and equitable partnership working across academia, sectors, and communities.
4. Sector Plans: Focusing our activities through “sector plans” which align with government Missions and Industrial Strategy priorities.
5. Ensuring Access to Information and Intelligence about current and potential partners to support researchers to forge meaningful external links through the new Corporate CRM and the Ideas Hub.
6. Supporting Publicly Engaged Research: Enabling our researcher community to engage with diverse publics and communities, championing participatory and commons-based approaches, and to strategically inform policy, ensuring our work delivers public value and societal benefit at all levels.
7. Using the Complex Initiatives Fund to support leadership development, advancing long-term research visions, managing complex research and innovation programmes, and driving key sectoral partnerships.
8. Cultivating Future Leaders: Identifying and equipping future leaders with the skills to guide strategic partnerships at both institutional and Faculty levels.
8. Leverage AI Expertise and Digital Infrastructure to enable shared data analysis, advanced research collaboration, and socially responsive innovation with external partners and communities.