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Research England unveils its Collaboration for a Sustainable Future programme, further enabling collaboration across universities for a sustainable cost-effective future.

Making the announcement at the Universities UK conference, Minister McDonald hailed the programme that will identify the barriers to collaboration and find practical ways to overcome them.

He introduced the first two funding opportunities that will enable groups to identify barriers and solutions, pilot new collaborations, and seed regional innovation partnerships across multiple organisations.

New investment opportunities

The first two funding opportunities, set to open on 1 October 2026, will be supported by £19.75 million investment, with projects receiving between £10,000 and £5 million.

New practical, ambitious and diverse ideas emerging from across the UK will be supported.

Investments could range from:

• universities piloting shared institutional resources for research and innovation support
• effectively engaging businesses and publics
• seeding new regional collaborations aligned
• local economies boosting growth

This builds on the successes of Research England’s shared technology transfer office pilot and Research England’s Manchester x Cambridge cross innovation partnership.

Dynamic research and innovation system

Research England will draw on experience and best practice from across higher education, industry, charities, public services, and other sectors to inform future approaches to collaboration.

Research England Executive Chair Jessica Corner said:

At Research England, we have been listening intently to the sector over the last few months as they face acute and accelerating pressures, and can today announce a new initiative that puts collaboration at the heart of what they do so well.

We are keen that universities share knowledge, and at Research England we are committed to create and sustain the conditions for a healthy and dynamic research and innovation system. We have seen enormous success over the last few years of the brilliance that can be realised when our world-leading institutions join forces. We would like to see that come to fruition in every corner of England.

The government’s vision, as laid out in the Post-16 Skills White paper, is for a research and innovation ecosystem that supports and keeps the UK at the forefront of global science.

This includes embedding sustainability and enabling collaboration.

Programme activity

Through the programme, Research England will carefully consider where its intervention is most appropriately targeted, which will have the most material benefit to ensuring long-term sustainability for the higher education sector.

£19.75 million will be made available across two investment opportunities launching on 1 October 2026:

• investment to enable groups to be brought together in order to identify, create and publish barriers, challenges and potential solutions to collaboration
• investment to enable pilots across England which test new models, and funding to seed innovation partnerships across the UK

More details will be available on the funding finder when the funding opportunities are live.

Understanding barriers and identifying solutions

We are inviting coordinating groups to bring together communities that represent English universities across places, sectors, and other lenses.

This is to jointly identify barriers and challenges, and to collaborate and to create potential solutions.

Funding available of £750,000 for projects between £10,000 and £100,000 of up to 12 months.

This will enable participating groups to produce published accessible outputs to share findings and recommendations to structured and strategic institutional collaboration.

Alongside this funding opportunity, we are launching an open survey to gather input from the wider community.

Pilots, and cross-UK innovation partnership seed funding

We will provide funding for:

• funding of around £4,000,000 for pilot projects between £100,000 and £1,000,000 million up to 24 months led by eligible English universities. Projects will test new collaborations and models which drive efficiency and cost effectiveness of the research and innovation system to support a transition toward sector sustainability, shared capability and collective contribution to national priorities
• funding of £15,000,000 for seed funding of between £1 million and £5 million for up to 36 months for UK universities to support ambitious cross-UK innovation partnerships. Projects will bring together complementary strengths from innovation systems within self-defined geographical areas across the UK to drive economic growth and generate wider benefits to deliver more than the sum of its parts.

We are interested in structured and strategic collaborations.

For example collaborations underpinned by formal multi-institutional contractual based agreements, led by universities, span multiple institutions, involve wider non-university partners as appropriate and deliver cost-effective solutions.

Some examples that we have and we are supporting include:

• Research England’s shared technology transfer office pilot: Evaluation: Shared Technology Transfer Office Pilot Programme
• Research England’s Manchester x Cambridge pilot: The Cambridge × Manchester Partnership