How universities can build clearer pathways for SME collaboration
Universities often have more to offer SMEs than SMEs can easily access. There may be relevant researchers, student talent, specialist facilities, funding routes, consultancy options, and regional networks. From the outside, however, this offer can be difficult to navigate. A company may believe that the university could help, while still being unsure where to begin or what kind of collaboration is possible.
This is where many university-SME relationships lose momentum. The challenge is not necessarily a lack of opportunity, rather a lack of a clear route into that opportunity.
Universities typically think about engagement through their internal structures: faculties, research centres, innovation offices, careers services, technology transfer teams, and business engagement units. SMEs experience the university differently. They do not usually start with knowledge of these structures. They start with a question, a challenge, or an opportunity.
From the SME perspective, the first concern is practical: can someone help, how difficult will the process be, what will it require, and is the effort likely to be worthwhile?
The easier that journey is to understand, start, and continue, the more likely collaboration becomes.
This perspective was reinforced during a workshop at the recent UIIN Conference on SME collaboration, where participants from universities across different contexts described many of the same challenges in designing effective pathways for SMEs.
What a usable SME engagement pathway looks like
For universities, SME collaboration cannot rely only on personal contacts, individual enthusiasm, or isolated success stories. These things matter, but they are difficult to scale. The task is to create a pathway that feels understandable and usable from the SME’s point of view, while still giving the university enough structure to respond consistently.
For an SME, a usable engagement pathway answers five practical questions:
- Where do I start?
- Can I begin in a small, manageable way?
- Will the process fit the size of what I need?
- Will the university remember previous conversations and context?
- If the first step is useful, is there a clear way to continue?
Both our research and the workshop discussions pointed towards the same conclusion: SMEs do not necessarily need more opportunities to collaborate—they need clearer pathways into the opportunities that already exist. Universities that work effectively with SMEs tend to make these five moments easier.
1. A visible way in
The first requirement is a point of entry that SMEs can easily find and trust. This may be a business engagement team, innovation office, enterprise unit, economic development unit, or named point of contact. The format can vary, but it needs to be actively monitored and connected to people who can move an enquiry forward.
Workshop participants consistently observed that SMEs often struggle less with identifying potential expertise than with knowing who should own their enquiry and how to reach the right person.
In practice, this means being able to:
- Capture the SME’s need in business terms, rather than university categories;
- Identify whether the enquiry relates to expertise, talent, facilities, funding, consultancy, or R&D;
- Decide whether the request needs a quick response, scoping conversation, or referral elsewhere;
- Assign a named person to keep the enquiry moving.
An SME with a technical problem, skills gap, or product question should not need to know whether the answer sits in a faculty, research centre, careers office, consultancy unit, technology transfer team, or economic development unit. The university should do that interpretation work and make the next step clear.
2. Small ways to begin
Once SMEs know where to start, the next question is whether the first step feels manageable. A company may be interested in university support but unwilling to commit to a large project before it has tested the relationship.
Universities should therefore define a small set of low-commitment formats that are easy to explain and ready to use. These might include a one-hour advisory conversation, student challenge, placement, feasibility discussion, lab visit, short consultancy assignment, or workshop around a specific business problem.
These formats help both sides test fit before committing more time or money. For SMEs, they reduce the risk of taking the first step. If every small collaboration has to be designed from scratch, the threshold remains too high.
Participants also highlighted that SMEs are often willing to explore collaboration when the first interaction is small, practical, and clearly defined. Low-risk starting points help both sides understand whether there is value in continuing.
3. Processes that fits the request
Small starting points only work if the process around them is light enough to match. A short advisory conversation, student project, or small consultancy assignment should not feel like the start of a large corporate research agreement.
One way to manage this is to set process thresholds:
This makes the route more predictable. SMEs can understand early what the likely timeline is, what information they need to provide, and whether issues such as confidentiality, data, IP, or facilities access are likely to matter.
Workshop discussions also highlighted the challenge of balancing institutional governance with responsiveness. Participants generally agreed that while legal, financial, and IP processes are important, they do not always need to be applied in the same way to every type of collaboration.
The point is not to remove necessary checks. It is to make sure that the process fits the scale and risk of the collaboration.
4. Relationship memory
Even when the first step is simple, the relationship may move across several parts of the university. An enquiry might begin with an engagement office, move to an academic or lab, involve contracts, and later require input from finance, careers, or technology transfer.
Several participants noted that relationships often depend heavily on individual staff members. When those individuals move roles or leave the institution, valuable context can be lost and SMEs can feel as though they are starting again.
For the university, these divisions may be necessary. For the SME, they can feel fragmented. This is why universities need a basic system for relationship memory. Relevant teams should be able to see who has interacted with the company, what the enquiry or project was about, who followed up, what was agreed, and whether there is a possible next step.
This could be recorded in a CRM, shared engagement tracker, simple Excel table, or another system that people actually use. The platform matters less than the discipline of recording enough information to avoid starting again each time.
5. A route to continue when there is value
Once the first interaction is complete, the university needs a simple way to decide what should happen next. A successful SME relationship does not always need to grow into a larger formal partnership. Some collaborations should remain small: a technical exchange, student project, focused piece of advice, or light-touch consultancy assignment may be enough.
Other first steps may create the basis for further work. A student project might lead to a placement, consultancy discussion, or funded feasibility project. A technical advisory session might lead to a lab test, workshop, or introduction to a researcher.
At the end of a first engagement, there should be a short review: did this create value, is there a further need, is the SME ready to continue, and who should follow up?
This makes continuation deliberate rather than dependent on whether someone remembers to pick up the conversation later.
What this means for SMEs
Clearer pathways also help SMEs play their part. A company does not need to arrive with a fully developed partnership proposal, but it helps to be clear about the problem, timeline, and first useful outcome. When universities make their routes easier to understand, SMEs can engage with more confidence and less wasted effort.
The shift for universities is practical: make the first step visible, keep the process proportionate, preserve the relationship, and create a clear route to continue when value emerges.
This is how SME collaboration becomes more predictable, navigable, and scalable — without losing the flexibility that smaller firms need.
Whether through the research, the case studies, or the workshop discussions, the same message emerged repeatedly: successful SME collaboration depends not only on what universities offer, but on how easy they make that offer to understand, access, and build upon.
Ready for more?
Building trust with SMEs is only the beginning. Once early interactions start delivering value, universities face a new challenge: creating the conditions for collaboration to grow and endure.
- Building strategic and sustainable university–industry partnerships explores how universities can move from one-off engagements to long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships through trust, alignment and shared value.
- Why universities struggle to collaborate with SMEs — and what to do about it examines the structural barriers that often prevent SME collaboration from taking off and provides practical guidance on designing engagement models that fit SME realities.
Luca Barbera (author) is a Project Officer at UIIN. His work encompasses a broad spectrum of research topics, including sustainability, deep tech, engagement practices for universities and academics, with a particular emphasis on the valorisation of results
