Rick Rohrbach, Huron: Advancing strategy and operational excellence in university–industry collaboration
UIDP’s Community Partners are organizations whose mission and work are complementary to UIDP. They possess skills and tools that are relevant to the UIDP community and that boost our efforts to develop and disseminate strategies addressing common barriers to university-industry collaboration.
Community Partner Huron is a global professional services firm that partners with clients to create sound strategies, optimize operations, accelerate digital transformation, and facilitate successful collaborations among industry partners. We recently spoke with Rick Rohrbach, managing director, about the role of strategy, operational execution, and relationship in advancing U-I collaboration.
UIDP: How does Huron’s mission align with UIDP’s work to develop innovative approaches and solutions that support U-I research partnerships?
Rohrbach: UIDP has played an important role over the past two decades in convening university and industry leaders to develop practical approaches for reducing friction in collaboration. That focus aligns closely with Huron’s work. We help bring to life the ideas and tools developed by the UIDP community.
UIDP creates space for stakeholders to explore complex challenges and generate new ideas. Collaborating with UIDP provides Huron with an opportunity to better understand how challenges are experienced across institutions and sectors and which solutions are most practical. Those insights inform our strategic planning work. And, given the size and breadth of our team, we are in a great position to leverage our experience with performance improvement and change management to operationalize the playbooks developed through UIDP.
There is a natural complement between UIDP’s role in shaping approaches and Huron’s ability to help bring those approaches into practice.
UIDP: What does Huron want to accomplish as a UIDP Community Partner?
Rohrbach: The primary goal is to deepen community engagement and expand the impact of the work already underway with clients.
UIDP offers a different type of interaction—one that is not tied to a specific project or contract but instead centered on shared problem-solving. That environment provides a more complete understanding of the challenges facing both universities and industry partners, which ultimately informs more effective strategy and execution.
There is also value in strengthening relationships with senior leaders who are shaping the future of research collaboration. Through those connections and conversations, Huron can contribute insights from its experience while also learning from others in the community.
More broadly, there is an interest in contributing to solutions that improve how research partnerships function at scale. While UIDP focuses on convening and knowledge-sharing rather than advocacy, the collective insights generated through the community can help inform more effective approaches across the broader research ecosystem.
UIDP: Please share a particularly successful project or partnership story that relates to university-industry collaboration.
Rohrbach: Much of Huron’s work focuses on reducing friction in how research is conducted and how partnerships are formed.
In one recent example, Huron worked with an R1 institution to evaluate its intellectual property portfolio. Rather than treating patents individually, the effort focused on identifying opportunities to package related assets into portfolios that would be more attractive to industry partners. This approach enabled the institution to better position its innovations for commercialization while creating value for external partners.
In another case, Huron supported a multi-campus research institution in evaluating its scientific core facilities. The work examined utilization, redundancies, and alignment with long-term research priorities. It also explored opportunities for collaboration with industry—both in outsourcing certain services and in identifying external partners that could leverage existing capabilities. The result was a more strategic approach to resource allocation and partnership development.
A third example highlights the operational dimension of collaboration. Through its “Research Office” managed services arm, Huron works with many leading academic medical centers and health systems to streamline clinical trial activation and management. In one case, timelines for initiating early-phase trials were reduced from several months to a matter of weeks by addressing administrative inefficiencies and aligning processes between academic and industry stakeholders. This type of improvement not only accelerates research but also expands access to new therapies.
Across these examples, the common theme is enabling more effective collaboration by aligning strategy, operations, and partnership structures. The goal is to create environments where research can move more efficiently from concept to impact.
