25 years ago I started working on a collaborative project, 3 universities and the regional development agency, funding small knowledge exchange projects supporting research commercialisation and regional engagement. At the time it was pioneering stuff.
Dan King
Back then, knowledge exchange occupied an emerging but still awkward position in university landscapes. Much was experimental or pilot, it was unevenly supported and although it often felt peripheral, there were strong advocates emerging. Today it is embedded in institutional strategies, measured through national frameworks, and delivered by dedicated professional teams with sustained underlying funding. The journey from the margins to the mainstream has been remarkable.
This piece draws on Dan’s experience spanning the pre-HEIF era through to recent work on partnerships, shared technology transfer functions and institutional strategies, and Dylan’s work examining how companies and SMEs experience collaboration in practice. It reflects on what has genuinely shifted, what has proved more resistant to change, and what the next decade is likely to demand.
From legitimacy to professionalism
The challenge for knowledge exchange is no longer whether it belongs in universities. That argument has been won. The challenge now is managing and supporting delivery to the increasingly professionalised standards across so many forms of engagement. Greater professionalisation has brought welcome clarity and career pathways, but also rising expectations: from funders, from partners, and from institutions themselves.
Dedicated teams and support infrastructures focus on policy engagement, commercialisation (and even here there are often meaningful distinctions between licensing and spin-out formation), public engagement, working with industry and civic partners. This specialisation has brought genuine depth of expertise.
Much attention is placed on structures and functions supporting knowledge exchange. This is an area Research Consulting has worked on for many universities. This is also the focus of work we are currently involved in – a major project on Research Professional Futures. This will shed light on the current landscape of research and KE professionals – their roles, functions and where they sit within universities.
But structures are only part of the story. In recent work examining collaboration from the company perspective, it is consistently clear that relationships and individual judgement determine whether a partnership succeeds or stalls — and for large-scale strategic partnerships, getting this dynamic right across structures and departments is critical.
This is particularly evident for smaller companies. Back in 2012 the Wilson Review acknowledged that smaller firms often lack the infrastructure to engage with universities without support. Dylan’s recent work on industry engagement with research organisations illustrates this. “what struck me was how formalised and well-structured the knowledge exchange landscape is (mechanisms, schemes, rules and so many entry points). This is daunting for SMEs and it’s hard to navigate the system – the importance of sustained relationships is critical.”
The persistent challenge of measurement: metrics reward what is visible, but much of what matters is hidden
The 1999-2000 origins of the Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction (HE-BCI) survey make it one of the earliest systematic attempts to measure knowledge exchange and external engagement by universities on a standardised basis.
It is a beguiling dataset: it tells us a great deal, and yet remarkably little. Nothing, for instance, about the disciplinary contributions that lie behind the headline figures. Much valued KE activity (like policy engagement) is unmeasurable in this form.
One of the genuine achievements of REF Impact has been to show how complex, unpredictable, and interrelated the impact arising from KE actually is. A filigree of activity, people and time. The richness of impact case studies sits in productive tension with the tidiness of the HE-BCI survey data — and that tension is certainly worth preserving and perhaps needs better connection to help external partners see scale and depth.
There have been thoughtful attempts to address the limitations of purely quantitative measurement. The Knowledge Exchange Framework’s dashboards and institutional context narratives moved in the right direction, allowing universities to articulate their approaches rather than simply report their outputs. But one wonders what an business would make of those narratives when trying to work out who to approach and why. They appear to be written more for positioning against peer universities and the funding agencies than “real” external partners.
The deeper question is not whether to measure knowledge exchange, but how to do so without flattening disciplinary difference or incentivising behaviours that prioritise what can be counted over what genuinely changes practice. ERDF offered a cautionary example: projects that were strategically sound often found themselves compromised by forced outcome measures that bore little relationship to the change they were creating. The temptation in any measurement system is to reward legibility over impact.
What is needed is less tweaking of HE-BCI and more of what might be called a “narrative KE” approach (parallels to narrative CVs are deliberate). One that foregrounds how and why knowledge exchange happens, and is oriented toward what external partners actually need to know to drive engagement, rather than toward institutional positioning.
The next decade may demand hard choices
The wider landscape for universities is already re-shaping knowledge exchange on the ground. Several pressures are converging.
The first is doing more with less. Reduced funding, constrained academic time, and tighter institutional budgets mean the sector will need to be more deliberate about where it focuses effort. “Less and better” may become an organising principle.
The second is the evolution of collaboration across institutional boundaries. Roll back to 2000 and the first regional knowledge exchange collaborations were beginning to take shape. The drive towards collective working has since matured into sustained broad based initiatives like the Northern Accelerator and Midlands Innovation — and more recently into exploring shared technology transfer functions. The logic is compelling: pooling specialist capacity allows smaller institutions to offer more, and larger ones to focus. This model will continue to develop in areas where there is tension between the depth of knowledge is needed and the level of activity within a single institution. There are challenges including accountability, responsibility and additional VAT costs.
The third is the role of technology in managing knowledge exchange relationships at scale. Back in 2003, conversations were already happening about the need for intelligent systems to answer a deceptively simple questions: what is our university doing with organisation X? Twenty years on, the aspiration remains familiar, but the tools to realise it are finally catching up. AI-assisted systems are now on desktops that can surface connections, flag conflicts, and support relationship management across complex institutional portfolios are no longer speculative. New products built around AI are emerging to drive business development and engagement. The question is how the sector uses them — and whether the behaviours and controls can be balanced to make them genuinely useful, safely.
The story of knowledge exchange over the past twenty-five years is, at its core, a story of professionalisation and ambition. The work now is to ensure that the structures it has built serve the partnerships and stakeholders that matter — and that the way it accounts for itself reflects the full complexity of what it does for these key stakeholder groups.
