Hi, everyone, and welcome to Collaboration in Action: Building Partnerships Within and Beyond Academia.  I’m Alys Kay, and I’ll be your guide for the next few hours. 

Let’s start with a question. If your goal is to build a research career that’s impactful, sustainable, and alive with possibility, then collaborative practice might be your most underused tool in your toolkit. But not collaboration as a buzzword. I mean collaboration as a strategic capability and as a human practice, something that you can get better at, invest in, and build into your career story.  But there is a trade-off. It takes time. The results are often indirect or delayed, um, and you don’t always see the benefits straight away.  But within academia, one increasingly orientated towards interdisciplinary challenges, civic engagement, and impact narratives. collaboration has become a career multiplier. It’s how you can increase your visibility, how you can open unexpected doors, and how you can position yourself for opportunities that have not been advertised.

So today is all about experimenting.  It’s not about pitching, it’s not about proving, it’s just about exploring what becomes possible when you say yes to connection. In today’s session, we’ll be exploring how you can map your existing network and identify gaps.  We’ll be exploring tools that will help you to find potential collaborators. And you will practice framing your work in ways that invite connection, not just credentials.

What does collaboration mean to you in one word?  The words you’re adding here say a lot about your own personal experience of collaboration. For some of us, collaboration has been energizing, creative, a chance to learn from others.  But sometimes collaboration can also be frustrating, it can be all meetings, and it can be difficult to kind of make things move along. Um, so today, it’s not just gonna be about sort of abstract values, it’s gonna be about how to actually build collaboration across departments, sectors, and disciplines in ways that are sustainable, strategic, and true to your work. 

Let’s start with the big picture. The research world is changing, and what funders are looking for now isn’t just about curiosity and brilliant ideas, it’s also about relevance, collaboration, and real-world impact.  As post-docs, um, you can sometimes be in a sweet spot. You know, you have deep expertise, but you’re also flexible, potentially mobile, and open to shaping what comes next in your career. Um, but it’s really important to be aware of the big-picture shifts that are happening around you. Um, and it’s not about chasing trends or trying to make your research chase trends, but it’s about staying visible, viable, and impactful in a system that is evolving at a really rapid rate. 

So what is causing this shift? Well, at a regional level, there’s much more focus on place-based funding, and that means aligning research with the needs of local communities and economies. Nationally, the UK government is investing in big missions and industrial strategy to drive growth. Um, so this is kind of sectors like clean energy, creative industries, and advanced manufacturing. Internationally, of course, things are even more volatile. So, um, the example of Horizon Europe, which, that money was affected by Brexit, is now, um, back in… open again, um, and back in the UK system, which is great.  But of course, trade barriers and political uncertainty, um, are affecting lots of things. I’m sure you’re all aware of the Trump effect and the effect that that’s had on, um, USA research funding.

Um, so… but still, international collaboration is, um, still a critical factor to think about. The UK government is putting serious investment behind specific sectors, and they are calling these growth engines of the economy. These include clean energy, digital and tech, life sciences, and creative industries.  They’re also backing big social missions like making the NHS more efficient, reducing crime, and improving social mobility. So if your research can connect to one of these themes, um, you’re not just more fundable, but you’re more visible. Um, this doesn’t mean twisting work to make it fit. It means getting curious about how your ideas intersect with what’s needed in the world.

UKRI is now running something called the Research and Development Mission Programme.  It’s a new model that puts challenge-led research front and centre. They’re appointing challenge directors who shape calls around urgent, complex problems, and it’s less about open themes and more about targeted portfolios. 

Before we shift into collaborative activities, I want to share a useful bit of knowledge with you, and that is to introduce the university’s partnership team.  And they are people who can make your collaboration ideas real. Um, so you might be sat there with a great idea, but no, uh, idea how to kind of get it started or where to take it. Or you might think… You could wish that someone could tell you if that idea’s fundable or who else might be interested, and that’s exactly where the partnership team comes in. So really, the partnership team are strategic matchmakers for external partnered collaboration. And here’s what they actually do.  They can help you to find the right people, whether that’s a civic partner, an SME, or a policy lead. They can guide your bids, so aligning your work with live and emerging funding priorities. Um, they can translate, so they can help you express your research in ways external partners understand. They can review and advise on timing, readiness, strategy, and cases for support. So these are the people who can help turn your interests into action, and they don’t just support the big, shiny projects. They support everyone. The earlier you reach out, the more you can do.

At the Sandpit event that I mentioned earlier, one of the key messages that Vicky, who is the head of the partnership team at Liverpool, said was, “Make sure that your My Liverpool profile is up to date.” So this is the internal platform that helps the partnership team to find you and match you with opportunities. So make sure that you add keywords, a clear summary of your work, and if possible, a line about the kind of collaboration that you’re open to. 

So I want to share a true story with you, um, and it’s one that I often think about when, um, I think about networking or making a leap in our careers.  Um, it’s actually someone who is an alumni of Prosper.  This is not her real name, but let’s call her Rina.  Rina had been in a long- been a long-term post-doc. She was brilliant, she was collaborative, she was thoughtful, she was highly skilled, but she was starting to feel really stuck and she wasn’t sure what else she could do. And more importantly, she wasn’t sure what else she was allowed to do.  Um, she started the Prosper program, and slowly she began to look at her skills differently, not just as academic, but as more transferrable, more portable.  And she realized she had the ability to bridge research and policy to translate ideas in ways that could shape real-world outcomes.  And so she’s thinking about this transferrable skill set and thinking about her kind of signature strengths in it.  On one day, she saw a job, a leadership role at a policy research institute. And her first reaction? “That’s not for me. I’m not a policy specialist.” But, um, the twist here is that she actually knew the director of that institute.  It was someone she’d worked with before, um, and respected deeply, and she already knew them.  And still her first instinct wasn’t to reach out.  Um, and why was that? It’s because she didn’t see herself as the kind of person who could take up that kind of space, even though the connection was already there.

But this time, um, because she’d been reflecting deeply about this stuff, something shifted and she said, “Because I’ve done Prosper, I’d been thinking intentionally about what else I could do, who else I could be, and I just thought, ‘What if I let myself try this?'”  So she reached out, she had the conversation, and the director said, “I didn’t know you were interested in these areas.” She applied, she got the job, and now she’s co-leading that institute and she’s building her own team.  And the point of that story is to illustrate how that opportunity didn’t come from cold outreach. It came from reframing an existing connection as available, and it came from giving herself permission, because often a real block isn’t actually network. Um, it can be internal rules that we’ve picked up somewhere along the way that say, you know, “People like me don’t do things like that.” So maybe the question isn’t about, “Who do I know?” But it’s about, “Where am I waiting for permission to see myself and my connections differently?”  Most of the time when people say that they can’t collaborate, they are not facing an external barrier.  They’re facing an internal sorry, stories like, “I’m not senior enough. I don’t know enough people.” They might say no. But what I’ve seen over and over again in coaching is that those no-but stories sound like fact, but actually they just are frames, and frames can be challenged. Um, so let’s, so what I want you to do is, um, let’s get all our no-buts out. I want you to get, list all your no-buts, all the reasons why you cannot collaborate. 

And as I said, so the second part of this exercise is all about the frame. Frames can always be challenged. So this time, I want you to, um, give yourself permission and reframe. I want all of your yes-buts.  “I can, I can collaborate because…” 

One of my own top tips from my own career experience is about learning how to speak about your goals.  Um, so speaking about your goals out loud is a game changer, um, and there’s quite a lot of research in career development that backs this up. They actually have cognitive benefits, so naming what you want to do activates your brain’s kind of goal planning system, and it turns this kind of fuzziness into focus, um, it has a social benefit as well. So your network, they can’t help you if it doesn’t know what you’re exploring.  The more you share, the more others mirror it back in the form of opportunities. And it doesn’t have to be, like a really clear goal. You can share really early.  You can just say, “I am exploring this, I am becoming interested in that.” Um, it has an accountability benefit.  So saying something aloud increases your commitment.  You’ve now kind of got like a mini audience, and that can be powerful as a motivator. Um, it also has the benefit of rehearsal. So each time you talk about your next step with someone else, you refine it and you learn what resonates.  You build confidence. So, you know, if you’re wondering like, “Is it too soon to talk about, um, a potential collaboration?” It’s not. It’s never too soon.  You can start with something like, “I’m exploring roles that combine data and social impact. I’m really interested in  X, especially in how it links to my work in Y.” Um,  expressing this kind of interest is really important for building  resonance, um, and signaling to others who have  similar interests, um, that this is the  area that you are interested in and it, and this is what you  want. 

Um, a simple bit of pre-work before you go into a networking space or before you go into some kind of collaborative conversation activities like this, is to make two simple lists.  Spend a bit of time making the first list, which is about what I bring, and this is really about trying to recognize the unique value that you have. So this could be around your skillsets, around the tools or methods that you use. It could be around, um, the communities that you work with or are connected to through your research. Um, and it can be helpful to clarify this, um, as a, as a pre-emptive step.

But then the second list is to make a list of what you need. So this is what are you seeking from  collaboration, and sometimes I know that it’s hard to be  specific ’cause obviously we don’t know what we don’t know,  but you can also think about this as a way of thinking about what  gaps are there in my knowledge that I would like to learn about?  What am I interested in? So it doesn’t have to be very specific, it can just be, um, a starting point. Um, and this pre-step is really useful because it can speed up the process of discovering what you have in common with other people and whether there is collaborative potential available. 

LinkedIn isn’t just a social network; it’s actually a really useful search engine for people and fields. And my top tip here is to use Boolean search. So, um, to add in an “and” or an “or” or a “not” within quotation marks. This helps you to make really specific search results that help you to explore career paths, organizations, and specific roles or skills, and it lets you identify specific niches, find people who meet those niches, um, and explore how roles are framed across institutions. Um, let’s be honest, uh, reaching out on LinkedIn has a real kind of factor, and maybe there’s a sense of, you know, what if I’m bothering them? What if it feels transactional?  What if I don’t know what to say? Um, so a way, so a way to reframe that is to think of it as curiosity and not self-promotion. So when you reach out, be specific. “I saw your work on X and I was really interested in Y.”  So I’m gonna share with you a real LinkedIn message that I constructed for a study that I was doing last summer where I was recruiting participants, like expert stakeholders, to be interviewed.  Um, and so I got about, I was reaching out to people on LinkedIn and messaging them, and I would say I got about a 40% success rate, which is pretty amazing rate given that I was asking for a   minute of their time for an interview. 

And the first thing about this is really to start with the why. So be specific. Um, why are you contacting them and why are you contacting them at this time?  So for a researcher, you know, you might say, “I saw your work on X and I was really interested in Y.” You might reference one of their publications or one of their conference presentations, um, and say specifically what you found interesting about it. The next tip is really to name their expertise, because people like being asked about things that they feel knowledgeable about.  Um, and hopefully as well you can approach it with genuine curiosity. 

The next tip is about safety. Make it safe and simple, and easy to learn more or easy to have a next step.  Um, so in this example you can see that I’ve put a link to a webpage which gives background on the project, that instantly kind of gives you that credibility that actually this is connected to something bigger and I’m not a spammer.  So you can, if you can put anything in like that, like you, your My Staff Research profile or anything that just establishes a quick credibility check, that can be really helpful, I think for, if you’re reaching out to someone as a potential collaborator, you want to keep it  low pressure and just say, “If you have minutes for a chat or can recommend someone else, I’d really appreciate it.”

So just to summarise um, these principles that can be used in any outreach situation. Um, lead with shared purpose, so think about the why. Why are you talking to them?  What is it that they have done that you can comment on that you’re interested in? Name their expertise. Um, make it safe and specific. Um, offer an easy next step, so make sure you through what the easy next step is before you approach them. And also, just be human. So, people get really in their heads about networking, particularly if they are talking to someone with a different background from themselves. But actually, um, the chattier, the more normal, the more, um, easy the connection will be. 

The next tool I’m going to show you is the UKRI Gateway to Research, which is a publicly accessible online portal that provides detailed information about research projects, funding, and outcomes funded by UKRI. So it’s all the other research councils as well.  This is a really useful way to find out about how collaboration happens in your field, um, because it allows you  to find out who is connected to who across industry, government, and beyond.  You can, um, search for any kind of keyword that you want. You can search for specific universities or companies. Um, you can search for researchers.  You can search for funding councils.  Um, this gives you a real-time map of the collaborative ecosystem, so who is leading? Who is co-investigating? When… Which institutions are repeat partners?  Just to show you, I was trying this out.  Uh, when I was preparing the workshop content, I was trying this out to see how it would work, and I just thought of something. I thought, “What is a topic that I’m interested in?” So, I put in social justice and I searched that, and then I really started to look. So what you get is a list of projects, a big, big list of projects.

But on the right-hand side there’s very interesting and helpful, useful filters, which you can really drill down into to find very specific things. So you’ve got the region that you’re in. Um, you’ve got all of these project categories, which I think is the most interesting and valuable part for kind of finding out specific things. Um, and as we were thinking. As I was looking at this and thinking about how it might be useful for researchers, I was thinking about types of projects that I know about, um, and I thought, “Okay, knowledge transfer partnership.”  I know that that’s a successful collaborative model that you…  That works across the industry and academia usually with multiple partners, so I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.  I’ll explore that one just to see.” So go back up to the top and say Apply Filter, and then we get this list of projects. And what was immediately interesting to me and kind of jumped out was this project here. So Manchester Metropolitan University and Positive Steps Oldham have, um, had a KTP together, and what’s interesting, particularly interesting to me is that I have collaborated with the organisation Positive Steps before. Um, so I had a co-collaborative project as a socially engaged artist with them about five years ago. Um, so in terms of reaching out to people in my area and my network, that makes it so much easier for me if I want to reach out to that organisation again.

Something else really valuable about this in terms of building your collaborative knowledge and collaborative intelligence is that organisations that have had KTPs with universities are obviously collaboration ready.  So they’re obviously used to working with academics.  They’re used to working with other practitioners from other sectors. Um, so they’re gonna be that much more approachable as well. To understand in practice who are the people in the ecosystem who are actually collaborating at the moment because they’re much more likely to be open to subsequent collaborations or collaborations with new partners.  So how would I suggest that you use this?  Well, you can use it to identify active researchers in your own field, um, around your own particular, um, publications or topics. You can use it to find, um, people who are within your field but interdisciplinary as well, and you can map collaborations between universities, industry, and those sectors.  You can discover funded projects and therefore emerging research themes. You can find potential partners for grants or cross-sector work. You can track funding trends, spot repeat collaborations, and explore impact pathways as well because you can see how other people have framed their research outcomes.  So this is a really great tool that turns funding data into networking insights.  It’s like a LinkedIn specifically for the research ecosystem. 

So just to summarise, ChatGTP is useful for brainstorming roles that you don’t know about or sectors or outreach drafts. Um, so just to summarize, ChatGTP can be really useful for drafting outreach. Though, of course, you have to read it and edit it yourself to make sure that it’s not fabricated anything, and to make sure that it has a human kind of tweak.  Um, as a caveat, you should never put any kind of research into any of the AI tools, and it can help you to brainstorm things you don’t know about yet, so things like adjacent roles, sectors, or other industries that you don’t know about. 

Um, LinkedIn can be really useful to map fields and find collaborators by theme or sector. 

Um, and then there’s Research Rabbit, which is not something that we’ve looked at, but this is a newer tool, um, that actually is about exploring research clusters and co-authorship, and it helps you to visualize connections across disciplines and track evolving themes. 

So, the last thing we’re gonna do in this workshop is for you to think about your own network at the moment, um, your own research ecosystem, your collaborative ecosystem. So, not just the people that you work with already, but those who enable, amplify, or align with your research direction. So this isn’t a contact list, it’s a map of relational assets and potential.  So I call this the five R stakeholder circles, um, and I invite you to use them to populate your own research ecosystem.

So, in circle one, we have research collaborators.  So, who are your current or recent academic collaborators, inside or outside your institution? Who shares your research goals, methods, or fields of inquiry? 

The second one is research enablers. So, who supports you, encourages you, helps you to see your value? Are there coaches, mentors, peers, line managers, even informal champions who support you and help you to stay in motion? 

In the third circle, we have resource connectors. So, these are people who help you access opportunities, funding, or infrastructure. This could be partnership officers, impact officers, research managers, knowledge exchange, business engagement staff. 

And number four is reputational amplifiers. So, these are people who share, cite, or spotlight your work, who might be included in panels, networks, working groups, newsletters, media. 

And then finally, we have resonant outsiders. So, who shares your values, your challenge areas, or mission, even if they aren’t in academia?  So this could be community partners, NHS workers, bits of the government, creatives, policy leads, lived experience advocates.

So, when you’ve made your research ecosystem, you can look at your map and think about where is your map strongest and where is the biggest gap? Who holds influence but doesn’t have visibility in your work?  Who could you re-engage or reach out to?  Where is there potential trust waiting to be activated, kind of stored up in your network? 

Let’s close by honouring the fact that you have already done something today that matters. You’ve slowed down, you’ve reflected, you’ve named what’s important to you, and you’ve made time for your own development. Um, now let’s take it one step further.  So please take a minute to write down for yourself one action, one person, or one intention you will carry forward from today.