Funding landscape
Collaborative projects: choosing partners and the collaboration agreement
Collaborative R&D applications live or die on the strength of the consortium. How to choose the right partners, split the work, and get the collaboration agreement right.
Why the partner mix matters to assessors
Assessors on a collaborative competition are not just scoring the technology; they are scoring whether this specific group of organisations, together, is the right team to deliver it. A consortium assembled to meet an eligibility rule rather than a genuine project need is usually easy to spot.
Each partner should bring a capability the others do not have, and the application should say so explicitly rather than leaving the reader to infer it from a list of logos.
Choosing partners for the right reasons
A research organisation partner should bring genuine research capability relevant to the technical risk in the project, not simply a route to eligibility. A business partner should bring either a route to market, complementary technology, or specific manufacturing or deployment capability.
Be wary of oversized consortia assembled to look impressive. Assessors will ask what each partner actually does in the project, and a partner with a thin work package and a large budget allocation raises more questions than it answers.
Splitting the work and the budget
Work packages should map cleanly onto capability, with a lead partner for each and clear deliverables and timings. Overlapping or vaguely shared responsibilities are a common source of both assessor doubt and later project management difficulty.
Because intervention rates depend on each organisation's size and the type of research it undertakes, the budget split needs agreement early. A partner discovering their funded proportion for the first time at the offer stage is a common source of delay.
The collaboration agreement
Innovate UK requires a collaboration agreement to be in place between project partners before grant funding is released, covering intellectual property ownership, background and foreground IP, exploitation rights, liability and what happens if a partner leaves the project.
Negotiate this early, in parallel with the application, rather than after an offer is made. Disagreements over IP ownership or exploitation rights are far easier to resolve before funding is on the table than once a partner has an incentive to hold out.
Managing the consortium once funded
A named project manager, regular reporting between partners, and a clear escalation route for disagreements should all be agreed before the project starts, not improvised once it is underway.
Innovate UK monitoring officers will expect to see evidence of active collaboration, not simply parallel work by separate organisations. Build genuine joint activity, such as shared milestones and cross-partner reviews, into the project plan from the outset.
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