The Association of Commonwealth Universities Equitable Research Partnerships toolkit focuses on improving partnership sustainability through equity, power-awareness, and shared practice. It is particularly useful for collaborations that span institutions, countries, or community/NGO contexts, where differences in voice, credit, resourcing, and decision rights can quietly undermine success. It can help you design how to: “Networks matter, but relationships matter more than visibility.” Martina Egedusevic, Impact Fellow, University of Exeter. Read more from Martina. What will you take forward? One thing to consider: Where does power sit in your partnership (funding, agenda-setting, authorship, data), and what one change would make decision-making more equitable?
Use proven templates to negotiate and structure external collaboration projects
The Lambert Toolkit is a sector-recognised set of model agreements and guidance for collaborations between universities and external partners (particularly industry). It is designed to reduce ambiguity early, make negotiations smoother, and prevent partnerships stalling due to uncertainty around IP, roles, and outputs. It provides model agreements covering common collaboration scenarios and helps you anticipate and resolve IP and exploitation questions up front. What will you take forward? One thing to consider: What is the single most likely “pressure point” in your collaboration (IP, publication, timelines, exclusivity), and which Lambert collaboration model best helps you address it?
Explore tailored research leadership resources
Established researchers express a wide range of leadership and management needs such as recruitment, performance conversations, delegation, effective meetings, coaching and mentoring skills etc. There is an overwhelming amount of advice out there: some relevant to established researchers, some less so. Rather than re-create it all here, we recommend and connect you directly to open access resources that are tailored to research and academic leaders: What will you take forward? One thing to consider: What is one leadership challenge you’re dealing with at the moment? Which single external resource could you engage with this week to move forward?