Beyond breakthroughs: How can research-industry partnership power UK growth

The UK today faces major socio-economic challenges: achieving sustainability, maximising resilience, improving productivity and maintaining global competitiveness. For industry to deliver sustainable growth, it needs innovation and research from educational institutions, secure, resilient supply chains and materials, and supportive government policy. Achieving lasting economic growth requires all sectors to work in concert.

As one of the world’s leading departments for applied research and industrial collaboration, Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) at the University of Warwick has a collaborative approach in its DNA from its founding in 1980. We recently spoke to Professor Robin Clark, Pro-Dean International at WMG, University of Warwick, to understand how WMG has sustained effective cross-sector collaboration within and beyond the UK borders over four decades, and how such partnerships can deliver lasting growth.

Key takeaways:

• Trust is earned through listening, respecting partner expertise, and demonstrating tangible impact before scaling collaboration.
• Breaking down silos and assembling multi-faceted teams across sectors and disciplines is essential for delivering real-world impact.
• Reskilling the existing workforce through responsive, partnership-driven training is as critical as developing future talent pipelines.

From your experience at WMG, what are some key enablers or barriers to making cross-sector collaboration work?

Any collaboration must begin with trust, mutual respect and a willingness to understand the challenges and opportunities faced by all parties. Listening and understanding your partner’s perspectives and priorities leads to real collaboration and co-creation. People are key.

One of WMG’s great strengths is our ability to support innovation from academic discovery through to commercial application.  We do so by employing not just brilliant academics and educators but also engineers with real industrial experience.

One of our longest-standing partnerships of over 25 years is with the Tata Group and its subsidiaries.  It’s a partnership that has delivered economic, environmental, social and technological impact through collaborative and innovative research and extensive education programmes. 

It has supported companies like JLR in delivering electric vehicles, facilitated the training of over 750-degree apprentices, and helped attract substantial investment into the UK economy.  For example, the development of a £4bn electric vehicle battery plant in Somerset for Agratas and a £1.25bn electric arc furnace in Wales.

Throughout the partnership, WMG has facilitated engagement with local, regional and national government, unlocking funding for facilities such as the National Automotive Innovation Centre (NAIC) – co-funded by the UK Government Research Partnership Infrastructure Fund (UKRPIF), JLR and Tata Motors – and the development of University Technical Colleges such as the two WMG Academies for Young Engineers, in which JLR and other industry partners play a critical role.

You’ve championed international partnerships, particularly between the UK and India. What lessons can be drawn from these collaborations about accelerating innovation and addressing shared challenges?

It is vital that you respect the expertise, knowledge and capabilities of your partners. They know their business, their challenges and their future goals far better than you.

You bring an understanding of how your existing capabilities and networks in innovation and education can support their ambitions.  Next, you need to establish credibility and show real impact.  Only then can you begin to build a partnership which is truly collaborative, not merely transactional.

The Tata-WMG partnership began at scale with Tata’s desire to develop the first Indian designed and manufactured car - the Indica. Our role was to help with the innovations, processes and skills needed to deliver their ambition. Earning that trust gave Tata insights not only into the skills and capabilities in WMG but also into the wider UK manufacturing sector, laying the foundation for much more significant collaboration and investment in the years that followed.   

What leadership capabilities are most critical for building trust and making collaboration effective across sectors, regions and beyond borders?

Listening and truly understanding the challenges facing our partners is most important. Next is a real commitment to ensuring that the work we do with our partners, whether in research or education, delivers a positive, quantifiable impact. Creativity is essential, too, and how you piece the different facets together in an innovative way. To succeed, you really can’t think in silos, departments, or sectors - you need to recognise that real impact needs multifaceted teams.

That forces us to focus on translating not just between industry and academia, but across all sectors, and to be flexible in finding partners and expertise relevant to the challenge. 

The ability to take knowledge and expertise from one sector (such as the automotive industry) and apply it to emerging and growth sectors such as agri-tech or createch is a core part of WMG’s heritage and future.  The reverse also applies - you might find your sector needs insight from another field entirely to have a successful impact. One of the great advantages of being in a university is that you have access to academic experts in all sorts of fields. For example, you might find you need an expert in psychology to understand how best to approach challenges in robotics or autonomous transport.

How can we align future skills pipelines with the needs of rapidly evolving industries? 

It is critical that we have a good understanding of where expert technologists, industry and educators see the skills needed for the future.

WMG is involved with Workforce Foresighting, collaborating with a wide range of partners to understand the industrial capability needs that are emerging in the next 5-10 years. We use this foresight to support providers of all types to address needs and create solutions.

While degree programmes will always be at the heart of what we do, industry also needs responsive and evolving training, so we apply our expertise to a range of short, sharp training interventions focused on meeting specific needs to ensure our partners remain competitive.

One of the most important things we recognise is that skills pipelines must reflect the fact that most people requiring training, in rapidly evolving industries, are already working in them. Re-skilling and up-skilling the existing workforce has always been a focus of ours, but it is more important now than ever.

We acknowledge that the traditional role of higher education has evolved, and that we need to be exploring a more diverse and creative range of approaches to learning. Partnering across levels, sectors, and geographies is more important now and for the future.

Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities for joint action to strengthen resilience, competitiveness, and long-term prosperity?

Ultimately, we need businesses to meet consumer and social needs more sustainably, productively and efficiently across every sector. This could be in foundational industries like agriculture and materials, emerging businesses such as autonomous mobility, or the building blocks of growth, such as energy.

The recently published Industrial Strategy creates a blueprint for turning future opportunities into growth.  Identifying the sectors critical to the UK economy and supporting them is welcome news to both WMG and our manufacturing partners.

Our expertise in batteries, the automotive industry, steel, clean energy, automation, aerospace, agri-tech and scaling SME capability through technology adoption all have a vital role to play in realising the government’s ambition.

And co-creation is key. We must work with our partners to link ideas, technologies and skills in a holistic approach.

Professor Clark participated in WIG's award-winning Exchange programme in 2023. A unique programme run in partnership with the Cabinet Office, it brings together the UK's top senior leaders to tackle cross-sector challenges and help drive productivity and growth.