Professionalising collaboration: How SDU is making engagement more strategic

How can universities make collaboration more strategic without constraining the relationships academics already build?

In this episode, Søren Land, Head of Team Collaboration & SDU Startup Station at University of Southern Denmark, explains how the University of Southern Denmark uses faculty briefs, cross-functional groups, a catalogue of services, and live dashboards to connect engagement with institutional priorities. You can listen to the conversation in our new episode or read the summary below:

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Summary

Universities rarely lack relationships with companies, public bodies, and other external organisations. The harder task is seeing how those relationships contribute to institutional priorities and deciding where support is most useful. Søren Land leads outreach and partnership activities at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), connecting its research, education, lifelong learning, and entrepreneurship work with public and private organisations. He has helped develop a framework that makes this activity more deliberate while preserving independent relationships.

The model treats professionalisation as an operating discipline. Faculty priorities define what support should achieve, cross-functional groups connect those needs with external opportunities, a catalogue of services turns ambitions into possible activities, and live dashboards make the resulting portfolio visible. Together, these elements allow SDU to move from retrospective lists of activity towards regular decisions about whether its engagement is serving the right purposes.

Live data turns reporting into active steering

SDU already used a customer relationship management system before introducing the new framework. Staff recorded activities, preparation time, meetings, and task details. When faculty management requested an annual overview, the team exported the information to Excel and then reformatted it in Word. The process demanded time, yet its conclusion could amount to little more than confirmation that the team had completed many activities.

That form of reporting showed volume. It offered limited help in judging whether current work matched faculty priorities or whether resources should be redirected. Søren’s team therefore focused on drawing CRM data directly into dashboards. Each activity is now tagged to a faculty’s strategic focus points, allowing managers and staff to see completed, current, and planned work through a live view.

The dashboards are live, up-to-date, and they are an asset for our stakeholders in to do agile adjustments and get an overview and impression of what is going on.

The dashboards support conversations rather than replacing them. Faculty groups meet management at least three times each semester to review the balance of activity across strategic priorities. If attention has become concentrated in one area, they can discuss whether that reflects the faculty’s needs or whether the portfolio should be adjusted.

Making the system useful also required a practical compromise. The team stopped recording the hours spent preparing for tasks and meetings, reducing the burden attached to consistent data entry. In return, everyone gained a view that removed the need for repeated spreadsheet exports and document preparation. CRM adoption became easier to justify because staff could see how their input informed decisions and helped them understand their own pipeline.

Faculty priorities give the framework its direction

Data becomes strategically useful only when it is connected to a defined purpose. SDU’s institutional strategy provides an overarching commitment to working “for and with society”, but its five faculties operate in different contexts. Humanities, engineering, and health may share an institutional direction while pursuing distinct educational and research priorities.

The framework accommodates this variation through a brief from each faculty. The number of priorities is flexible; the requirement is specificity. This gives the support team a clear basis for planning, recording, and reviewing activity while keeping the faculty’s own strategy at the centre.

We just need to be specific so we can anchor up activities .

The briefs are refined with faculty management because even senior leaders may not immediately recall every relevant initiative from previous years. Once the priorities are settled, the discussion moves into departments and corridors, where researchers and teachers can identify activities that support their programmes and projects.

This internal starting point also shapes conversations with external partners. Companies may arrive with ideas, interests, or preferred timelines, and the partnership team can bring promising suggestions to academic colleagues. Yet an activity must strengthen an educational programme, support early-stage research, or address another recognised faculty need. SDU is transparent that collaboration may therefore proceed more slowly than a partner would prefer. That clarity helps protect academic objectives while giving external organisations a more convincing explanation of what the university can offer and why.

Cross-functional groups connect needs with opportunities

SDU reorganised its support team into five faculty groups, each aligned with one faculty and its brief. Every group combines three perspectives: staff who understand educational programmes and early-stage research, partnership specialists who know companies and public-sector organisations, and business developers from the incubator who contribute entrepreneurship and innovation methods.

Now you have a 360-degree approach, knowing education and research, knowing the outside world, knowing entrepreneurship and innovation and the tools from there, which are basically tools to create value.

This structure gives each faculty a recognisable team with named responsibilities. It also allows useful practices to travel across the institution while leaving room for faculty-specific priorities. The common workflow creates consistency; the brief determines how it is applied.

A catalogue of services helps translate that structure into action. Researchers and teachers may know what they want to achieve without knowing which form of engagement would help. The catalogue offers proven activity types, including mentoring, company cases, and contributions to educational programmes. Staff can use it to suggest a suitable intervention once the academic objective is clear.

The combined team has also created routes for entrepreneurship expertise to enter education. Søren describes an early example in which staff provide three workshops on basic entrepreneurial tools within an ECTS-bearing component of a science programme. The framework gives SDU a way to test that approach, learn from it, and consider whether it could support other faculties.

Professionalisation protects existing relationships

The framework began with an acknowledgement that no central team can see every partnership across a university. Researchers and educators already build relationships directly, and Søren regards that freedom as appropriate. SDU’s objective was to add value to those networks by broadening them where useful and improving the support available to faculties.

Researchers should be able to do partnerships and collaboration with companies in the public and private sectors they wish for.

This distinction prevents professionalisation from becoming a demand for central ownership. The support team first clarified its mandate with each faculty, including permission to identify relevant organisations, understand their interests, and record that knowledge in CRM. It could then approach engagement as a service grounded in academic priorities.

The partner data makes the service more precise. Staff can see which faculties interest a company, whether it can work with international students, and whether it is open to cases, mentoring, or other forms of involvement. When a faculty need emerges, the team can search an established knowledge base instead of beginning every request from scratch.

Professionalisation therefore rests on two kinds of clarity. Academic colleagues can see which support is available and how it relates to their objectives. External partners receive a more direct account of the university’s requirements, possibilities, and constraints. The framework makes the route into collaboration easier to navigate while preserving the relationships that people develop independently.

Distributed ownership keeps the model adaptable

The operating model changed who participates in strategic discussions. Faculty-group members now meet faculty management directly, rather than receiving instructions relayed through senior managers. A rotating group lead takes responsibility for updated dashboards, clear agendas, and meeting records, but the role is not a permanent management position.

We also accepted, as management, a certain loss of control.

For Søren, the benefits have extended beyond faster communication. Team members hear priorities first-hand, observe how faculty leaders respond, and use capabilities that were less visible in the previous structure. Clear strategies and shared information give them a defined field in which to exercise judgement.

I have seen members of the team who are growing. They are bringing skills and competencies into play I didn’t see before because they have the field to play now.

The model remains young, and Søren is careful about claiming impact too early. SDU can monitor the volume and type of activity, the students and organisations involved, and annual patterns. Qualitative feedback from companies and researchers can add depth. He currently places less value on comparisons with other institutions because a difference in the number of interactions says little about whether SDU’s own stakeholders received relevant support.

If someone does 100 interactions more or less than we do, I’m not quite sure what would bring me.

Maintaining valid data and stakeholder confidence is an ongoing task. The framework’s value lies in giving staff and faculties a shared way to examine their work, make adjustments, and learn which forms of support deserve to spread. Søren Land’s experience suggests that professional collaboration grows through strategic alignment, usable information, and enough delegated authority for the people closest to the work to act.

Ready for more?

Universities often have no shortage of external relationships. The challenge is understanding how those relationships contribute to institutional priorities, where support creates the greatest value, and how engagement can be managed strategically without becoming overly centralised.

• Building strategic and sustainable university–industry partnerships explores how universities can move beyond transactional interactions to develop long-term, trust-based partnerships. It offers practical guidance on aligning engagement activities with institutional priorities and creating the conditions for collaborations that deliver lasting value.
• Inside Oregon State’s partnership model for industry and community engagement examines how a university can create clearer pathways between external partners and internal expertise. The article highlights the importance of coordination, visibility, and institutional structures that make collaboration easier to navigate for both academics and external stakeholders.

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