What collaboration at scale looks like: Lessons from Rolls-Royce

What turns a portfolio of university projects into shared research capability?

In this episode, Mark Jefferies, Head of Research Partnerships at Rolls-Royce, explains how the company develops university relationships into long-term research capability. He shares lessons on concentrated investment, bottom-up demand, senior support, succession planning, and the challenge needed to keep established partnerships relevant.

You can listen to the conversation on our podcast or read the summary below:

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Summary

Rolls-Royce has made university partnerships central to its research model. The company has shifted much of its research and technology activity into an international network that functions as a major part of its technology base. Mark Jefferies, Head of Research Partnerships at Rolls-Royce, helps ensure that this system supports the company’s business and industrial strategy while giving researchers the conditions to deliver.

The scale of this activity is substantial, including support for around 400 to 500 PhD researchers at any one time. Yet its defining feature is the connection between projects, people, infrastructure, and institutional leadership. Mark’s experience shows that collaboration becomes strategically valuable when partners work towards a shared long-term position, build capability around that ambition, and create enough trust to confront difficult questions together.

Long-term ambition gives collaboration its direction

Large partnerships can become absorbed in individual projects, contracts, and short-term negotiations. Mark advises universities and companies to begin with the opportunity they want to create and work backwards towards the structures, resources, and relationships required to reach it.

Think about the long-term opportunities that come from , and then work backwards.

This perspective changes the function of governance. Framework agreements can reduce repeated negotiation, while a clear strategic destination helps people make sensible decisions within agreed boundaries. Without that connection, a relatively small contractual issue can consume attention and delay activity with much greater potential value.

At Rolls-Royce, Mark’s role is to ask whether the portfolio adds up. He considers how university activity supports company strategy, whether the right partners are involved, and how the system can make delivery easier. Day-to-day projects remain with engineers, academics, and subject specialists; the partnership function connects their work with the wider institutional picture.

Just think about where you’re trying to get to, then put in place the structure that allows for that and empower your people to work within that environment.

The approach suits Rolls-Royce because its products are mission critical and remain in service for decades. Research decisions must account for performance, safety, maintenance, and the ability to respond when a product behaves unexpectedly. Long-term capability and retained knowledge therefore carry value well beyond the end of a single funded project.

Concentration connects projects with wider capability

Collaboration at scale requires enough activity to justify sustained investment, but volume alone offers a limited measure. Rolls-Royce tends to concentrate work with selected universities or small groups around strategic themes. This makes it possible to connect individual research projects with doctoral training, specialist equipment, succession planning, and future investment.

At the project level, a researcher may be working on materials, aerodynamics, or another technical challenge. At the partnership level, the company and university can ask where the field needs to be in five or ten years, which infrastructure will be required, and how talent should develop around it. The resulting portfolio becomes a coherent research capability instead of a collection of unrelated awards.

Concentration also enables conversations with university executives. Rolls-Royce can explain the company’s direction and ask whether a university wants to develop the relevant field. The university can set out its own ambitions, the expertise it can contribute, and the support it would need. Alignment at that level gives individual teams a more stable environment in which to work.

The wider ecosystem remains essential. Major facilities may require industrial and public investment, planning permission, land, energy supply, specialist design, technical staff, and doctoral training. These contributions usually sit with different organisations. Building at scale therefore depends on explaining a credible shared vision and bringing the required actors into alignment.

If you have a dream and you want to create something, you have be able to explain that dream to someone else so they get on board with it.

Strategic partnerships grow from useful work

Rolls-Royce’s strongest relationships have generally developed over time. They often begin with a small number of projects in which researchers and engineers want to work together, deliver useful results, and return with further questions. Once the activity becomes sufficiently important, the organisations can add investment, infrastructure, talent planning, and formal strategic governance.

The demand from the community (researchers, academics and engineers in the industrial side) needs to be there as a solid foundation. The teams have to want to work together to achieve something. If you have that, you can start building engagement.

This foundation matters because a partnership announced from the top can leave delivery teams searching for a purpose. A purely bottom-up relationship has a different limitation: researchers may spend years pushing against institutional barriers without the authority or resources to expand. Durable partnerships combine practical demand from the research community with support from senior leaders.

The assessment becomes broader as a relationship grows. Rolls-Royce considers the university’s strategy, location, commercial arrangements, available resources, and the ambitions of the people leading the research. Open discussion can reveal whether both organisations are prepared to make the commitments that a long-term partnership requires.

Many of these relationships have lasted for decades. That history becomes valuable when an urgent technical problem emerges. Researchers already understand the technology, the organisations have an agreement in place, and people know whom to contact. The partnership can respond quickly because trust and working knowledge were established before the crisis.

Longevity still requires renewal. Rolls-Royce challenges existing activity so that familiarity does not become an assumption of continued funding. Horizon-scanning teams examine emerging fields such as AI and quantum computing, while university partners bring ideas from other parts of their institutions. Business teams also present changing customer and product needs, creating a continuing exchange about new technologies and ways of working.

Shared knowledge reduces dependence on individuals

Strong personal relationships create momentum, but they also introduce risk when knowledge sits with one person. If that individual leaves, a project may stall and the remaining partners may struggle to understand an unfinished piece of work. Rolls-Royce addresses this by building teams and encouraging researchers and engineers to pass their learning to others.

If one person from a team of one leaves, you’re in trouble.

Team depth provides one form of resilience. A group of ten can absorb a departure more easily than an isolated specialist, even when the person leaving played an important role. Succession planning also gives talented people space to progress while preserving the capability they helped create.

The next level of scale comes when knowledge is captured in tools and processes. A method stored in one spreadsheet remains difficult to use beyond its creator. Once it has been validated, deployed safely, and incorporated into an engineering tool, thousands of people can apply it as part of the design process. Rolls-Royce’s analysis codes in areas such as fluid dynamics and structural mechanics embody the contributions of many researchers and make that work available across the business.

Moving an idea into routine use takes work after the original research. The company must confirm that the tool is reliable, integrate it into established processes, and help the engineering community use it correctly. This translation is where research becomes operational capability and dependence on its original creator begins to fall.

Trust must support challenge as well as continuity

Every partnership benefit carries a related risk. Access to exceptional researchers can be disrupted when people move. Shared equipment may be unavailable when the company needs it because the university owns and operates it. Concentrated relationships build depth, yet they also require deliberate efforts to remain open to ideas elsewhere.

Just about every advantage in that partnership has a flip side. There’s a risk that goes with it.

Rolls-Royce manages these tensions through governance, horizon scanning, and candid dialogue. Established partners can be asked whether an approach remains good enough, how it affects the business, and what has been missed. The history of the relationship makes those conversations possible, while continued challenge keeps the work connected to current needs.

Impact also needs to be viewed from several positions. Engineers may value a new material or analysis code. Recruitment teams may focus on skills and talent, while universities may look to papers, patents, prizes, advisory roles, or case studies. Government may value benefits to the wider economy. Mark argues that each partner should identify what matters most to it while recognising the additional outcomes created across the system.

Collaboration at scale is therefore an institutional capacity built through repeated delivery, shared investment, and sustained attention. Mark Jefferies’ experience at Rolls-Royce suggests that the strongest networks connect long-term ambition with practical work, spread knowledge beyond individual relationships, and use trust as a basis for continuing challenge.

Ready for more?

Strategic university–industry partnerships are built over time through useful work, shared investment, and the trust to challenge established approaches. Rolls-Royce’s experience shows how connecting individual projects to long-term ambition, infrastructure, talent, and institutional leadership can transform research collaboration into lasting capability. If you would like to learn more about how R&D-intensive companies structure, govern and sustain strategic university partnerships, explore these resources:

• How Innovate UK drives business growth through knowledge transfer explores how structured collaboration can embed academic expertise within a company, strengthen its internal capacity to innovate and create relationships that continue beyond an individual funded project.
• Corporate models of engagement: How large R&D-intensive companies structure and govern university partnerships examines the different models companies use to coordinate university relationships, concentrate investment and align research and talent partnerships with their wider organisational priorities.

Stay tuned for the next episode on this series and don’t forget to follow us on your preferred podcast platform!