Collaboration for a Sustainable Future: Identifying barriers, challenges and solutions to institutional collaboration for a sustainable cost-effective future

Overview

This is not an application process for funding. There is no funding associated with this survey. Funding opportunities within the Collaboration for a Sustainable Future programme will be made available through UKRI‘s Funding Service.  For more details on how we will use your data, please see the information under the heading ‘How we will use your data’ at the end of this section.  

Research England supports English higher education providers to create and sustain the conditions for a healthy and dynamic research and knowledge exchange system. This supports UKRI’s mission to advance knowledge, improve lives, and drive growth.  

We will use the information provided through this survey, alongside our initial £19.75 million investments, to build the evidence base on collaboration and test new approaches to a sustainable cost-effective future. This will help us better understand where barriers and opportunities exist, and identify where Research England can deliver longer-term, evidence-based interventions through the Collaboration for a Sustainable Future (CSF) Programme. 

If you would like to provide a multi-institutional collective response, we would like to make you aware of the funding opportunity for the enabling coordinating groups to identify barriers and create solutions available on UKRI’s funding finder ‘OPP1444: Research England Collaboration for a Sustainable Future: Coordinating groups'.

The CSF programme sets out to identify barriers and opportunities to institutional collaboration within the research and innovation system for a sustainable cost-effective future.  We are interested in practical, ambitious and a diverse range of ideas.  

Through this survey, we are seeking views on structured and strategic institutional collaboration for a sustainable cost-effective future, for example collaborations underpinned by formal multi-institutional contractual based agreements. Some examples which we have and/or are supporting include: Research England’s shared technology transfer office pilot and the Cambridge x Manchester innovation partnership. 

We are looking to build on learnings and best practices from different perspectives. We welcome views from across the research and innovation system including higher education, industry, government, charities, social enterprises and other communities if you feel you can contribute to our aim.     

The focus for this survey is the research and innovation system in England given the role of Research England. 

Collaborative research projects are not within the scope of this programme. Environmental and other types of sustainability are out of scope unless they are enabling a cost-effective future.  

We expect consideration and understanding of the impact of new approaches on the culture and environment of our higher education research and innovation system, for example the impact on equity, inclusion, diversity, trust and collective responsibility.     

Programme background 

The UK’s strongest differentiating asset is the quality of its research and innovation system which by most metrics is, per capita, world-leading and to a very great extent driven by our extraordinary university system. Universities are engines of economic growth and drive societal impact both in the regions in which they are each situated and through the collective strengths they share and deliver to the UK economy.  

However, the university sector is under acute and accelerating pressures.   

The Government’s vision is for a research and innovation ecosystem that supports and keeps the UK at the forefront of global science including by embedding sustainability and enabling collaboration.   

Before you begin, please note: 

• All questions have been made mandatory. If a question is not relevant to you, or you do not wish to provide the information requested, please enter "Not applicable". 

• Providing information about yourself or your organisation will help us understand the context of responses. Where this information is not provided, it may limit how the evidence can be interpreted. 

How we will use your data: 

• Responses, including personal data, will be analysed using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to identify common themes, patterns and insights across submissions.  

• A summary of the findings from this exercise may be published on the Research England and/or UKRI website. This may include anonymised excerpts from individual responses. If you do not wish your response to be used in published outputs, please contact us at strategicprogrammes@re.ukri.org.  

• You are asked not to include any information in your responses that you would not be comfortable being published.  

• Your name and/or email address will not be published.  

• With your consent you may be contacted by Research England to invite you to participate in future engagement, policy development or evidence-gathering activities related to this programme. 

• All personal data provided to UK Research and Innovation in connection to this survey will be processed in accordance with current UK data protection legislation. Further information on this programme can be found on the UKRI website. Further information on how we use personal data can be found on the UK Research and Innovation Privacy Notice (https://www.ukri.org/who-we-are/privacy-notice/). 

*By providing your information you are giving consent for RE to its use as detailed above. 

The survey will close on the 30 April 2027.