Partnerships | Professionalising collaboration: How SDU is making engagement more strategic

Maybe to kick off.

So I said the title professionalizing collaboration, it's a mouthful, but what are we talking about? What does that mean for you? When we'd say professionalizing collaboration? How did you approach that at SDU and what triggered it? What was the problem, for example, that you were trying to solve?

Thank you, Sarah.

I think first of all, I think we needed to acknowledge the collaboration, engagement with the outside world and especially with companies within public and private sector is something that was already ongoing and at SDU already before we thought of trying to do what we are calling a professionalized framework.

And you probably also need to acknowledge that many of these collaborations, they are done in kind of partnerships.

And it's basically impossible to get a total overview of all the partnerships that goes on and works within a university with the outside world.

And that's the way it should be, because I think basically researchers and whomever, they should be able to do partnerships and collaboration with companies and public private sector as they wish for.

But what we wanted to was to find out how we could divide the optimal support in this case for our five faculties.

And we wanted to make sure that we went towards this assignment, this objective in the most professional way.

So you could ask yourself, what is professional then? That could be the baseline before going on with the discussion.

So in this case, professionalizing business is also about aligning it and anchoring it with the relevant strategies.

So we probably all have been working with strategies where you have something from bottom up with a mission.

You have pillars that are made out of must-win battles in order to reach a higher vision where you somehow provide more value than you did before you started your strategy work.

So as I see it, to do professionalized engagement and collaboration is about anchoring your efforts up in strategies.

And it's plural.

It's not only in one strategy, but hopefully they are aligned.

And that was the case here.

So we had a high focus on our own strategy in the team that also had a vision saying we wanted to be what you could call the preferred partner of our stakeholders.

You can swap stakeholders with faculties or maybe even customers if you'd like to.

So we wanted to anchor it up there and then we wanted a high focus on our stakeholders' strategic focus points.

Because if we could anchor up in our own strategy and in their strategy, which is it goes without saying, anchored up in the overall institutional strategy of University of Southern Denmark, which is the strategy towards 2030.

Then we have, you could say, a secure foundation for our work.

And I also think it would be reasonable and fair to say we would achieve some kind of more professional setup and framework to do so.

So basically, we looked into making sure that we were anchored up in strategy with HIFO on our stakeholder strategic focus point.

So this was basically the first part of building this new framework.