For universities: what a complete collaboration entry contains

Who this is for

Industry-linkage and technology-transfer offices, and the ICT or communications teams that maintain their pages. It is also useful to research vice-presidents who sign off on the page.

The finding measures how universities present collaboration on their public websites. This page is the other half: what a complete entry contains, so any office can check its own page, and any map can record it consistently.

It is a standard, not a ranking. Nothing here is scored, and none of it is a legal requirement.

The ten fields

1. The office, named once

One name for the function, used everywhere: industry linkage, technology transfer, university-industry linkage. It should sit in the main navigation, no more than two clicks from the home page.

Partial: reachable only through site search, or several overlapping offices with no indication which is authoritative.

2. A named lead

A person, a role, and the office they lead. Not “the director” alone, and not a name without a role.

3. A direct contact

An institutional email or telephone number for the office or its lead. A general switchboard is a fallback, not a route. A personal Gmail works but signals that the office has no institutional channel.

4. What happens after first contact

The step most pages miss. A partner should be able to tell:

• how to propose a collaboration,
• who decides,
• what documents are needed,
• roughly how long a response takes.

Two or three sentences are enough. A blank page is not.

5. Collaboration and community areas

A partner-facing list, in plain language: joint research, testing and laboratory access, student internships, staff training, technology licensing, community programmes, procurement.

Avoid “we foster collaboration”. Say what you want to collaborate on.

6. International partnerships

Either named partner institutions, or an international office with a named lead and a direct contact. A list of countries is weaker than a list of institutions.

7. Projects or partners, named

Specific, not generic. “A joint research project with X on Y” beats “several international collaborations”. Dates help.

8. Specialisations and services

Two things, ideally together:

• what the university is strong in (agriculture, energy, health, computing);
• what a partner can actually use (laboratories, testing, consultancy, training, prototyping).

9. An IP position

Patents, licences or technologies available for licensing — or an explicit statement that none are currently available. Stating “none” is better than silence, because it tells a partner the question has been considered.

10. One dated item from the last two years

A project, a partnership, a competition, a report. With a date. This is the difference between a live function and a page that was published once and abandoned.

The copyable template

Office:            [one name]
Lead:              [name, role]
Contact:           [institutional email or phone]
Collaboration:     [areas you want partners for]
Services:          [services, facilities, technologies]
How to start:      [steps, documents, decision-maker, timeline]
International:     [named partners, or international office contact]
Recent work:       [project or partner, with date]
IP:                [available, or explicitly none]
Last updated:      [date]

Ten lines. Most of the gap in the study would close with these fields.

Check your own entry in ten minutes

1. Open your university home page in a private browser window.
2. Try to reach the linkage office in two clicks. If you cannot, a partner cannot either.
3. Read the page as if you were a company with no contacts inside the university.
4. Answer the ten questions above. Mark each full, partial or absent.
5. Start with the three weakest. Usually: the process, the contact and the date. A perfect entry is not the goal; a usable one is.

Limits

This standard describes the minimum a partner needs to act. It says nothing about the quality of the office, the strength of its research, or the value of its partnerships. A page can meet all ten fields and still be a poor partner; it can fail all ten and be an excellent one.