Lessons in collaboration from Singapore

Collaborations are of course about teaching, learning, research, infrastructure, staffing, and the thousand and one other things that allow organisations to work together.

Anybody who has ever entered one can tell you about the detailed negotiations, the stickiest of sticky-points, and of course the enormous joy if and when it works out.

They are also the idea that we can achieve more together made real through organisational fusions. To collaborate with another is to surrender a part of ourselves in the acknowledgement that working together allows more impact to be achieved. The extent to which any organisation changes depends on the kind of collaboration and the impact is a mixture of good fortune, good timing, and good planning.

Collaboration should never be the end in itself. It is not a strategic imperative to decide to work with someone else. Where collaboration is the end a misalignment of purpose, loss of direction, and expensive retrofitting purpose onto a set of structures becomes almost inevitable. The reason collaborations drift is not due to lack of willing but due to lack of planning.

The collaboration question

On 3rd November we are hosting The Collaboration Question which will consider the practicalities of collaboration. It is not a clinic on how to merge but a set of deep interrogations on what works, what does not, and the questions we should be thinking of as we consider new models of collaboration.

Collaborations come in all forms and federations are one collaborative model that many people will be familiar with. Most familiarly there is the University of London which brings together seventeen different higher education institutions to enable "collaboration between institutions, shared expertise, and access to collective resources and networks."

University of London is only one of dozens of different kinds of federations across the globe. As we’ve previously written about in Wonkhe they come in all different forms.

A federation may be a shared brand, an informal network, a federated project with individual or shared ownership, a national or regional mission with shared funds, shared infrastructure with formal governance relationships, a group of universities with a single degree awarder, a coalition of providers with a shared and funded purpose, or an entirely devolved body that only exists through dint of the activities of its members.

The University of Arts Singapore (UAS), which sits somewhere on the collaboration to federation spectrum, is a particularly interesting example. UAS emerged as an alliance between LASALLE College of the Arts (LASALLE) and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA). UAS has a vice chancellor, each member has its own president (who are the deputy vice chancellors of UAS).

UAS has a clear mission which is focussed on creative arts education. The collaboration emerged from two institutions with a strong history. LASALLE had been delivering its programmes since 1984 while NAFA was founded in 1938. UAS is a private institution but it emerged thanks to government support. The institutions have remained distinct, retaining their own degree awarding powers, but students may also receive a UAS degree. The government rationale for this arrangement was that they wanted “[...] the university to contribute more to cultural life in Singapore and the region, and offer a stronger value proposition to its students and stakeholders.”

When two becomes one

The real achievement of this collaboration, aside from the speed at which it has been carried out, is that it has allowed two distinct institutions to retain their own strengths and identities while coming together on core areas in administration, and curricula.

For students, it is a best of both worlds where they have more choice between institutions, for the Singapore Government it allows a greater economy of scale for impact, and for the international reputation of the country it allows more international collaborations.

Every collaboration is different but there are some lessons that may be worth thinking about in the context of the UK. The first is that the government clearly and loudly supported this work. They put time, and spent political capital, in making the case for the benefits of the alliance not only for the institutions but for Singapore as a whole. Currently, the UK is absent of any kind of clarity on what is permissible within mergers, nevermind a clear steer from the government on what it would like to see more of.

The second is that the institutions were able to align their configuration behind their purpose. The mission of the alliance is to “inspire leaders and empower creative individuals through an innovative and socially impactful arts education.” As such, they have used the alliance to enhance its academic offering, play a bigger role in the cultural life of Singapore, and to combine teaching-learning and research.

The third is that the kinds of assets they have brought together make sense for what they are trying to achieve. There is a lot of discussion on the complementarity of institutions that work together. In this case, the two institutions had some strengths in achieving their shared goal. Through bringing together these strengths they could achieve more than they could achieve alone.

It is a collaboration that emerges out of purpose, strategy, and operations, underpinned by a government that sees their shared success conjoined to the success of the nation. It surely has not been easy but from the distance of the UK it looks impressive.

We'll be discussing more about making collaboration work at The Collaboration Event in London on the 3 November. Programme and tickets here.