Jump to: Getting started, Support for partnerships at LSE, Funding
Working with non-academic partners can help you:
- Increase your impact’s relevance through gaining insight on how to shape your dissemination and engagement activities to best speak to your users and beneficiaries.
- Extend your impact’s reach and significance through connecting with partners’ own networks, resources and expertise.
- Enrich your research and impact through aspects like building new skills, gaining access to new information and perspective, creating sustained links that can form the basis of new projects.
- Access funding opportunities. Many funders encourage academics to include partnerships with businesses and industry, policymakers, and third-sector organisations (e.g. charities, community groups, or social enterprises) from the very start of a new research and impact project
Building effective partnerships takes time, effort, and the ability to strike a balance between your priorities and interests as a researcher and those of the group(s) you wish to work with. These relationships generally go beyond the transactional, and are highly collaborative, involving the co-creation of aims, objectives, and activities, and mutually beneficial goals. Your partnerships will be uniquely shaped by your project and impact objectives, but, when approaching building new relationships, it can be helpful to start by:
Identifying who you want to work with and why. Clearly set out your objectives and explore which external groups these might connect with, and what you can offer each other.
Customing your approach. For each potential partner, sketch out an understanding of mutual areas of interest (do your research: websites, organisational strategies, annual statements, media, and your own networks to these groups can all help you build this knowledge). Ask yourself what each partner can bring to your project and what might most interest them and drive their participation (it might be helpful to create a benefit statement for each partner, illustrating your understanding of their priorities and how working with you will be of value to them).
Building a strategy for connecting to these groups. Once you have crafted your list of ideal partners, think about the steps you might take to connect with them.
- Do you, or colleagues, have existing links, that you can draw on?
- Have you taken steps to make non-academic audiences more aware of your work (e.g. creating non-academic outputs like blog posts, policy briefings, or articles for non-academic outlets; attending or hosting engagement events with non-academic participants)? Read through our guide to effective engagement.
- You can also seek advice from LSE’s research engagement, impact and innovation support teams.
Support for partnerships at LSE
LSE Philanthropy and Global Engagement (PAGE) is committed to advancing the School’s philanthropic, alumni, corporate and international partnership engagement and can help advise researchers on LSE’s existing links to these groups and their priorities
The Public Affairs team can help you get your research and ideas in front of policymakers by building a political communications strategy based on your ambitions and recommendations.
LSE’s Innovation Mangers specialise in turning ideas generated from research into new businesses, products or services that benefit society.
Funding
LSE offers key internal funding routes for engagement (or knowledge exchange), impact, and innovation across career stages that can help researchers with building and expanding the reach of external partnerships. These include the Engagement and Partnerships Development Fund, Impact Development and Evaluation Fund, and Innovation Fund. We also offer departmental KEI funds and KEI fund for PhD students.
You can browse these and relevant external opportunities on our engagement and impact funding opportunities page.