It’s genuinely exciting to see the press releases come into the inbox about new collaborations going on across higher education.
When organisations collaborate, they have the potential to build something greater than the sum of their parts, with greater impact than each could have had individually. And in a context where higher education’s potential stakeholders can struggle to find a way into the system, collaborations are often able to create a space where the sector’s partners can connect into what universities have to offer, extending the networks, ideas, and impact still further.
That doesn’t mean that collaboration should ever be seen as an end in itself. The first and most important question any conversation about a potential collaboration should engage with is, “what is this collaboration trying to achieve?” And hard on the heels of that one comes, “are we certain that collaboration will make that goal more achievable, and not less?”
Because collaborations are hard work – they require governance, resourcing, and buckets of emotional energy for those whose job it is to maintain the relationship outside their own institution and, typically, explain and defend the collaboration to those inside their institution who might be sceptical of its value or question whether the juice is worth the squeeze.
Working with other organisations is also fun and it gives you a fresh perspective on your own context – even on a small scale it can be a great platform for new ideas. Even so, collaboration is only ever worth it if the strategic challenge is such that either one party cannot tackle it alone, or because the prize on offer is so significant that it’s genuinely worth the bother of setting up and sustaining a long-term relationship.
Feel the fear and do it anyway
Right now, higher education institutions are facing the twin (and not entirely unrelated) challenges of severe financial pressures in the here and now, and answering the question of where higher education needs to sit in the wider educational ecosystem in the decades ahead.
Collaboration seems to answer both those questions in different ways: through pooling resources and coordinating around complementary areas of strength higher education can in theory realise more value, more efficiently. But actually achieving this means transformation – not necessarily at the scale of full merger, though it’s understandable that that might be on the table – but in becoming the kind of organisation that is geared up to identify the opportunities from collaboration, and realise these in practice, in a sustainable way, that delivers over the long term.
There are significant structural factors in play that make this harder, too – not just competition law, but active competition in a tough recruitment market, that makes even starting a conversation about shared goals feel like it could put your institution at a disadvantage. In England, in particular, there’s not much of a regulatory or funding infrastructure geared towards facilitating collaborations. And while those institutions that have charitable status do have a long history of collaborative research, participation in subject and professional networks, and a shared mission around public value to draw on to help frame collaboration agendas, in the contemporary higher education landscape that’s only one model for a higher education organisation. There’s no reason why the private HE sector shouldn’t be an active partner in any collaboration but the different business incentives, missions, and cultures do need to be understood and accounted for at the outset.
There’s lots of narratives swirling around the sector about collaboration – it’s viewed as scary and threatening, it’s a new era of collaboration, it’s merger by another name, it’s the solution to saving vulnerable subjects. People will say in the same breath that this is a sector that collaborates all over the place at the same time as bemoaning the ways that every university (and every department or school of a university) will insist on every system and process being bespoke for their particular needs.
Everyone loves the idea of collaborating – but is everyone prepared to put what’s needed on the table to build a sector-wide culture of sustainable and impactful collaboration? And we’re talking to you, too, Andy Burnham.
Making it work
On Tuesday 3 November at The Collaboration Question in London we’ll be convening higher education leaders who might define themselves as “collaboration curious” to explore the strategic and political context for collaboration in higher education, drawing on in depth research on the current collaboration landscape, and case studies from inside and outside higher education.
We’re not going to focus either on full-scale merger or on the pocket projects that energetic staff take on off their own bat, but on the bit in the middle – strategically meaningful, resource intensive, force-multiplying.
We’ve picked two critical areas where we think collaboration is an obvious strategic imperative. Regional economic growth is one – because we’re seeing a shift from calculating your economic impact on a single institutional basis to playing an active role in a wider economic ecosystem. The other, trickier, one is working through the tensions between access and student choice in a competitive market. We’re sure you can come up with others.
We’ll also be trying to get under the skin of how you build a functioning collaboration from the ground up – both the top-down vision and strategic value rationale and the bottom-up execution and realising of that value. If you have an active large-scale collaboration on the go and would be interested in contributing to our research project exploring the infrastructure and cultures that enable collaboration in higher education, please get in touch.
The Collaboration Question is taking place at the Impact Hub in Euston in London on Tuesday 3 November. Find out more, view the agenda, and book your ticket to attend here.
