Vice Provost’s View: Building and growing innovative relationships with external partners

Dr Celia Caulcott, Vice-Provost (Enterprise), writes about the exciting, challenging and rewarding journey in building and growing relationships with industry and innovative partners. Universities minister Chris Skidmore recently underlined how strengthening links between universities and their partners in industry and elsewhere can 'turbocharge economies' at a regional, national and global level. I was reminded of this at last month's Royal Society conference on 'Transforming UK translation'. Speaking about university-business partnerships, Dr Malcolm Skingle CBE, Director of Academic Liaison at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), emphasised that 'no single technology-driven company, however large, can be truly innovative on their own'. All companies must collaborate to survive, he added. Indeed GSK has more academic collaborations than any other UK headquartered company - with UCL being among GSK's top HE institutional collaborators. By the same token, I strongly believe that for many university research groups, collaborating in different ways with partners outside of academia will enhance their research and the benefits it brings to wider society*.