Reaching out to Businesses
If you intend to reach out to business through your research and realize a collaborative project, identifying the right business partner will be crucial for the success of the project. You will need to find a partner with an interest in your research expertise and a genuine commitment to academic collaboration. The stronger the alignment between your research and a business’s agenda, the more fruitful the collaboration will be. In approaching a business, think of how you can add value to the organisation with your research expertise. A project based on a two-way exchange which benefits both researcher and business partner is more likely to generate interest and a positive response.
While existing business experience and contacts will be good starting points to foster collaborative relationships, these are not a necessary pre-condition for research-business collaboration. Inquire within your Department about existing business engagements, use LinkedIn to search and connect with LSE alumni and stakeholders in your area of interest, and make the most of LSE resources.
Here is a list of resources that will help you establish links with business partners that are interested in social science expertise:
Make use of LSE Careers resources for business engagement:
LSE Careers hosts a range of events, including Friday coffee mornings, employer and alumni insights events, and sector specific networking events, which provide opportunities for connecting with representatives from a diverse range of businesses and companies. The Careers website also offers a helpful business sector overview, listing links and resources.
Get involved with Zinc, LSE Lean Accelerator and LSE Generate:
The LSE is a founding partner of Zinc, a company builder dedicated to solving social problems. Bringing together experts from the social sciences, business, design and technology, the Zinc Accelerator Programmes offer opportunities for academics and students to get involved and bring their research skills and expertise to help businesses tackle social challenges.
The LSE Lean Accelerator helps LSE researchers, students and alumni to develop innovative ideas into a business. It offers entrepreneurship and commercialisation training and facilitates the translation of promising ideas into spin-out companies, consultancies, and licensable innovations.
LSE Generate is the School’s home for student-led entrepreneurship. It supports students and alumni in building a socially responsible business, in the UK and beyond, running funding competitions, events and networking opportunities all year round.
Explore Aspect:
Led by the LSE and six other UK universities, Aspect provides a social science platform for entrepreneurship, commercialisation and transformation that encourages collaboration between academics and businesses and helps to apply social sciences to private and social enterprise. The Aspect network can help you connect with like-minded partners at LSE and other leading UK universities to unlock wider social impact opportunities.
Pathways to Collaborative Research
PhD and Early Career researchers across the LSE have followed different strategies for conducting collaborative research. Below are their most commonly adopted pathways to research-business-collaboration.
- Researcher pro-actively reaches out and initiates collaboration or learning partnership with an organisation/business as part of a research project: partnerships were formed to gain access to data, test out ideas, or apply expertise and research skills to business environments
- Researcher works part-time for a company while conducting PhD research within the company: researcher uses the company as a case study, or brings in research expertise by analysing company data, contributing to the development of a product, or applying expertise to a company problem
- PhD student is “recruited” as a research student on a collaborative project jointly set up and supervised by an academic (often the PhD supervisor) and a business partner; in some cases, such collaborative projects may be funded as part of the ESRC Postgraduate Collaboration scheme
Discover more about other PhD and Early Career researchers’ individual collaboration pathways and get inspired by reading these collaboration stories.