International alliances are the route to research excellence

In its short history of nearly fifty years, Warwick University has capitalised on its setting in the manufacturing heartland of the UK’s West Midlands. A strong commitment to manufacturing, even when others were disinvesting, allowed the Warwick Manufacturing Group to forge partnerships with industry, including Land Rover and Jaguar, which continue to invest in the development of the campus.

“This commitment to connections with industry is based on excellence in research, and in recent years, that excellence has been at the heart of the university’s strategy to become globally connected,” says Stuart Croft, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research. New alliances with Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and a partnership with New York University in the Centre for Urban Science and Progress, are important parts of the modern strategy.

Relationships with industry

“Warwick had a reputation in the 1970s of being the entrepreneurial, innovative university,” said Croft, “It was established in part to be close to the region and to work with industry in various sorts of ways. The university’s founder, Lord Butterworth, ensured that it was the first university to work strategically to engage with industry. In the 1970s, this was the subject of some controversy, not least led by EP Thomson, the Marxist academic, who wrote a pamphlet called Warwick University Limited. In his view this was a bad thing, but the university saw the engagement with industry, based on academic excellence, as a good thing.”

This engagement has become a key pillar at the university, with the Warwick Manufacturing Group, an international research group of over 450 people, working with a variety of SMEs, as well as larger companies such as the Indian steel company Tata. This is not just about tech transfer, Croft notes, but about the “co-construction of knowledge” with “Jaguar Land Rover research teams working together with university research teams.”

Moving forward internationally

A modern focus for Warwick is to build strategic international partnerships with other universities.  “The partnerships are very much research-led,” said Croft, “then afterwards we look at possibilities for exploitation.”

The partnership with Monash University began when both recognised shared strengths, leading to a decision to look for key areas where this could be exploited. “It was very much a strategic move,” said Croft. In addition to joint Master’s degrees and PhDs, the alliance has created a joint senior academic appointment. “We have global advertisements for research posts, which are part-time at Monash and part-time at Warwick. This supports the labs in both places and allows us to have extended relationships with industry in both places for a similar set of research skills,” Croft said.

Warwick is also a partner university of the public-private Centre for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. “This is about how to make cities work better”, said Croft. “There are strands of work on transport, strands of work on communications and so on. While a lot of the research is very New York focused, aspects of urban science can be transported to other cities, for example, Singapore. The Centre has got a lot of public sector interest and engagement from industry and business.”

Warwick has jointly-appointed staff with the Centre and collaborates on joint research projects, “Some of which will be funded by industry and non-higher education sources,” said Croft.

Importance of alliances

“Internationalisation” may be a favourite buzzword in European education policy, but Croft is precise on how Warwick stands to benefit, saying “First, it gives us a platform to appoint genuinely world-class academics. People will come for something special.  Secondly, it embeds us in top class research collaborations, so that it’s not just left to the individual academic. We have strategic research collaborations that will last over many years in these particular fields. Thirdly, it will bring us closer in those spaces to funders, obviously including industry.”