The Future of Challenge-Driven Partnerships: Takeaways from the UIDP Cambridge Workshop
July 23, 2024
—The world has changed dramatically over the past decade. The pandemic represents just one of the global challenges that underscore the need for multinational and multisector collaboration to tackle the most pressing needs of our time.
In 2014, Cambridge University and UIDP (along with others) convened senior research leadership from the U.K. and the United States to identify ways for academic and industry partners to develop effective strategic partnerships. This month, UIDP returned to England to co-organize a new workshop to identify opportunities, challenges, and actionable steps to unleash the power of cross-sector partnerships to address major societal and global issues.
Finding approaches to grand challenges
On July 9-10, UIDP held a workshop with the University of Cambridge Policy Evidence Unit for Commercialisation and Innovation (UCI) and the Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (CSTI) in Cambridge. The event brought together an impressive cohort of funders and leaders from academia, government, and industry from the U.K., Europe, and North America to explore ways university-industry partnerships can help solve grand challenges as well as ways to get involved with and leverage existing efforts to create breakthrough solutions. The event focused on opportunities and barriers to developing effective challenge-driven partnerships, trends in challenge-focused priorities in global and local government policy, lessons learned from leading practitioners, and the next steps toward solving global problems through research collaborations.
Through expert panels and highly participatory breakout sessions, participants drew from their own experiences. Among the key takeaways:
- Funders play a key role in enabling cross-sector collaborations to drive meaningful change in large-scale issues. Private funders, companies, and government agencies can supply the monetary investment required to advance partnerships.
- Today’s grand challenges are often “wicked problems”—not only complex but also open-ended, without a single, definitive solution. Breaking them into smaller pieces with defined milestones for solutions can help drive progress and enable flexibility as technology, priorities, or other factors change.
- Grand challenges can act as a shared priority and rallying point to engage and energize not only involved parties but also the next generation—an important consideration as recruiting and retaining talent becomes an issue in itself.
Challenge-driven partnerships must be strong and resilient to succeed. Although aligned R&D interests are the primary drivers, people are the key component that moves progress forward. Open environments and knowledge transfer will contribute to the collaboration’s success, and it’s essential to recognize that many individuals in research partnerships also act as diplomats and intermediaries for their organizations. Often, the issues that arise during cross-sector collaborations involve competing priorities or processes, so building a partnership on trust and mutual understanding is crucial.
Place-based innovation
UIDP held a separate workshop on July 8 focused on place-based innovation and the importance of local context in a global economy. Innovation thrives when participants understand and connect with the organizations within their region and build trust within communities. Innovation ecosystems are an opportunity to leverage diverse resources that drive innovation and economic development while addressing grand R&D challenges. Challenge-driven research can help regional teams coalesce, redefine and sell themselves to other collaborators and deliver impact locally and globally. Tapping into the experience of multidisciplinary players in the local ecosystem can bring valuable individual and organizational perspectives to these challenges. Including smaller research-performing organizations and underrepresented communities also ensures that solutions to grand challenges consider the groups that may be disproportionally affected by research outcomes. Overall, uniting perspectives, partners, and resources behind a shared and clearly articulated goal drives progress and discovery.
Why it matters
In the face of pressing global challenges, organizations worldwide are re-evaluating how their research projects can contribute to solving these critical issues and delivering impact. The Cambridge workshop was a rare opportunity to convene senior research leaders around the urgent need to identify opportunities, barriers, and best practices and chart a course for the next decade to enable challenge-driven partnerships. For more information on how partnerships can fuel worldwide change and address global issues, see previous 3-Minute Reads on multinational collaborations, partnerships for climate change, and international research priorities.
We want to hear from you. How is your organization combatting global challenges with its research partnerships? Let us know on our LinkedIn profile.