Intentional partnerships: knowing what each relationship is for

Written by Charles Cormack, CCG Chairman - September 2026

Universities do not need more partnership activity. They need better evidence about which relationships can deliver commercially, which have genuine research potential, and which can credibly do both.

Ambition has not been the problem

Universities have talked for years about building deeper international partnerships, and in most cases the ambition has been genuine. The problem has been more practical: how do you know, early enough, what a particular relationship could realistically become?

Too often, institutions begin with a broad sense that another university looks like a good fit. The geography is attractive, the reputation is strong or there is already a useful personal connection. Those things can open a door, but they do not tell senior leaders whether the relationship is commercially viable, whether there is real research complementarity, or whether both are present.

Intent is important, but intent on its own is not enough. The real challenge is knowing where to focus it.

Partnership development means two different things

The phrase ‘partnership development’ is used as if it describes one job. In practice, it covers two quite different disciplines.

A TNE relationship, whether an articulation, progression, franchise or validation arrangement, depends on product alignment and demand. Do the programmes map? Will the credits transfer? Is there genuine demand for the route, at the proposed price, in that market? Will the relevant regulators accept it? These are commercial, academic and quality questions.

A research relationship starts somewhere else. It depends on whether particular academics or research groups have complementary expertise. Could they compete for funding together, share facilities or produce work that neither could deliver alone? Once the evidence points to a credible opportunity, personal chemistry still matters. No dataset can replace the conversation between researchers.

It is therefore unrealistic to expect one team to do both jobs without support. An international office is generally set up to identify opportunities, build relationships, negotiate agreements and manage recruitment pipelines. It cannot reasonably be expected to assess researcher-level complementarity across every faculty. That is not a criticism of the team. It is simply how universities are organised.

This also has implications for governance. In many universities, an international partnership is expected to sit either with the PVC International or the PVC Research, even where it has a credible case in both teaching and research. Separate approval routes, forms and evaluation criteria can then turn a useful overlap into a debate about ownership. Universities should reconsider this. Relationships with both dimensions need a shared route for consideration and evaluation, with international and research leadership involved from the outset, rather than being forced into one category.

Not every partnership needs to do everything

We all know that not every partnership should combine teaching and research.

Some TNE relationships are, quite properly, commercially driven. An articulation or franchise agreement that recruits well, teaches well and serves students properly is a good partnership. Adding a vague research ambition to the memorandum does not make it stronger.

The same applies in reverse. Two research groups may have a shared problem, a credible funding opportunity and a strong reason to work together, with no teaching dimension at all. There is no need to invent one.

The missed opportunity is the third category: institutions where there is both a viable education proposition and genuine research complementarity. These relationships can be particularly valuable because success in one area can provide the platform for the other. Historically, however, they have often been found by chance rather than by design.

The issue is how to narrow the search

The starting point has not changed. A university must still decide what it wants a partnership to achieve. No tool can answer that question on its behalf.

What has changed is the speed and cost of testing potential partners against that intent. Cormack Consultancy Group built Collaborizer for this purpose. It uses current publication and funding records to identify where institutional research strengths overlap, where they fill gaps and which active academics sit behind the opportunity.

The analysis does not rely on broad subject labels, reputation or existing co-authorship. Those indicators can be useful, but they do not show clearly where a relationship could go next. The comparison can start with an existing partner portfolio, an instinctive shortlist, a target geography, a ranking band or every institution in a national system. CCG specialists then screen the recommendations before they reach the client, with the review status stated clearly.

The purpose is not to produce another long list. It is to reduce a large field to a small number of defensible priorities.

What this looks like in practice

For a Scottish engineering-led university with a branch campus in South-East Asia, CCG assessed all 238 institutions in the market against the university’s research footprint. The branch campus was treated as part of the university, not as a potential partner. Around two dozen institutions showed meaningful research alignment, which resolved into eight crossover themes and five priority areas of untapped potential.

The important finding was not simply which institutions came top. It was why. High-volume fields such as business and Islamic finance created overlap with many broad universities and risked obscuring the areas that genuinely distinguished the client. Once the analysis gave greater weight to globally distinctive strengths, a national energy-sector technical university emerged well ahead because of its alignment in geoenergy and carbon capture. It was also already a warm partner, with 78 joint papers.

Other results pointed to a different type of opportunity. The market’s largest technical university had high shared volume but 49 joint papers. A construction-focused technical university had substantial overlap but only three. In antennas, radio frequency and metamaterials, the client and three universities were each publishing several hundred papers but had barely co-authored. The result was a short agenda of specific engagements, each linked to named themes and named academics.

The same approach is often even more useful for existing partners. A Welsh applied university wanted to understand whether its live TNE relationships had enough research depth to develop beyond teaching delivery. Sixty-two screened connections produced nineteen themes, five of them in the highest tier.

The opportunities were very different by partner. With a South-East Asian economics university, the strongest areas were tourism, heritage, applied economics and econometrics. With a science, technology and maritime academy in North Africa, the opportunity was led by engineering and sustainability, including circular-economy implementation, climate-responsive housing and secure machine learning for smart-city systems. The value was not in declaring both partners ‘good’. It was in showing what each relationship could realistically support and giving the university a basis for deciding where to invest first.

Early-stage relationships benefit in the same way. One client had signed a trilateral agreement with two sub-Saharan African partners but had no clear view of what the three institutions should do together. The work identified 68 approved connections across nine themes, four of them strong enough to support funding conversations. One opportunity, focused on bioprocessed insect-cereal composites for African food security, had not been identified by the partners themselves. The proposed academic lead already had thirteen joint papers.

In another case, a Welsh research-intensive university assessing three flagship universities in Central Asia began with around 45,000 possible researcher pairings. The final output was approximately 25 themes and three highest-confidence entry points. That is the difference between having a country strategy and simply having a country list.

The analysis has to reach named people

A finding such as ‘these universities are compatible’ is not enough. A useful output must identify the relevant academics, the theme, the supporting evidence and the level of confidence.

This matters because analysis can only take the process so far. It cannot tell a university whether two researchers will want to work together. That is settled through conversation. What the evidence can do is make sure the right people are having that conversation and that limited partnership-building time is spent on the 20 candidates worth contacting, rather than the 200 that merely look plausible.

The evidence narrows the search. It does not make the decision.

What the evidence does not prove

Research complementarity does not make a franchise viable. Demand, product alignment, delivery capacity and regulatory acceptance do that. Equally, a well-matched articulation route does not prove that there is a research opportunity.

The two dimensions need to be tested separately. Either may exist without the other. Assuming that one proves the value of the other is how universities end up listing joint publications and research bids as partnership ambitions when there is no credible shared ground beneath them.

Where both dimensions are present, there is a better chance of building a more balanced relationship. Teaching-only agreements can become asymmetric, with one institution supplying students and the other supplying the degree. CCG’s Equitable TNE model addresses this by using a per-student contribution to support joint research, faculty exchange and scholarships. The model works best when there is genuine research complementarity on which to spend the fund. That needs to be established, not assumed.

The practical ask for university leaders

There will always be an element of serendipity in international education. Some excellent partnerships will continue to begin with a chance conversation. The objective is not to remove that. It is to stop the whole pipeline depending on it.

For vice-chancellors and pro-vice-chancellors, the practical steps are straightforward:

·       Decide what each partnership is intended to achieve before assessing potential partners.

·       Give international and research teams a shared evidence base, so they are not evaluating different things in parallel.

·       Accept that some relationships will be commercial, some will be research-led but a significant  number can credibly be both.

·       Establish which category a relationship falls into before signature, rather than discovering it several years later.

·       Put time and resource behind the relationships that have enough substance to develop a second dimension.

Most partnerships do not fail in dramatic fashion. They simply plateau because nobody established at the outset what else might be possible.

Across CCG’s pilot institutions, including Russell Group, regional and specialist universities, the most striking point has been how quickly the discussion changes once the evidence is available. Universities using this approach will not necessarily sign more partnerships. They should be able to choose fewer partnerships more carefully, and be much clearer about what each one is for.