OPINION
Is there enough collaboration between Australia's universities? This was a question that was posed repeatedly by presenters and panellists at last week's Future Campus Universities Without Walls Symposium and Universities Australia Solutions Summit. Subsequent discussions were often in the context of education and teaching (flexible learning, recognition of credits, and so on) and also in the broader context of university mergers (such as the creation of Adelaide University, and recent examples from the UK).
When the conversation turned to research, the consensus from the Higher Education leaders gathered in Canberra was that collaboration in research is encouraged (and often rewarded through stronger projects and higher rates of funding success). However, it seems clear that there is scope to do more in other areas. When considering research leadership and research enablement, an interesting example of an organic and effective approach to evolving essential support services comes from recent initiatives in Scotland.
In late 2025, the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) opened its Research and Innovation (R&I) Shared Services Collaboration Fund. This targeted initiative starts from a premise Australian research leaders will find immediately familiar: that while universities have become adept at collaborating on research itself, the essential professional services that underpin that research – grant management, technology transfer, due diligence, compliance, contracts, training – have been slower to follow suit. As the SFC put it: "the default approach to essential R&I services is to 'go it alone' and seek solutions to provide these in isolation. But many universities are facing the same issues, need the same expertise and policies, and use the same systems."
The Fund's design was deliberately catalytic rather than ongoing. It provides seed funding to groups of universities to develop sustainable models for sharing back-office R&I services, covering the initial costs of change and helping institutions navigate the difficult proof-of-concept stage. The logic is straightforward: de-risk the exploration of new collaborative approaches in a financially constrained environment, demonstrate that sharing works, and then step back. The expectation is that what gets built will be self-sustaining.
Five projects have recently been announced and are now getting underway. All are noteworthy.
The Scottish Safe Haven Network (SSHN) is a collaboration between universities and NHS health boards to leverage the value of national health datasets. A project aims to create a shared services model for accessing data for research in line with the Scottish Government’s strategy for health and social care.
Two other projects are regionally configured commercialisation partnerships. In the Tay-Forth region on Scotland's east coast, the universities of Dundee, Stirling and St Andrews are building a coordinated commercialisation ecosystem across their geography. In Glasgow, the University of Glasgow is partnering with Glasgow Caledonian University to enhance the latter's capacity for entrepreneurship, innovation and commercialisation – a deliberate pairing of a larger, more experienced institution with a smaller one that stands to gain from access to established expertise and infrastructure. Both projects reflect an acknowledgement that critical mass matters, and that geographic proximity offers a natural foundation for sharing.
The other two projects are arguably more novel, and potentially more instructive for the Australian context.
The Trusted Research and Secure Innovation (TReSI) Network, led by Heriot-Watt University, is designed to strengthen the capacity of Scottish universities to conduct research securely, responsibly, and transparently. In an environment where trusted research and foreign interference concerns have moved from the margins to the mainstream of research policy – a trajectory Australia knows intimately – TReSI is building something that no single institution could easily justify developing alone: a scalable digital toolkit encompassing standardised processes, decision-support materials, audit tools and, critically, case studies. The ambition to standardise due diligence, monitoring, and reporting requirements across the sector is significant. So too is the project's intent to provide adaptable tools that help institutions identify and manage high-risk research areas. Importantly, developing detailed case studies will move the conversation beyond anecdotes and the extreme examples that surface in the press when things go wrong. For any Australian research leader who has grappled with the practical challenge of implementing the Guidelines to Counter Foreign Interference (often with limited dedicated resource and in the absence of clear and consistent sector-wide benchmarks) the TReSI model will resonate strongly.
The final project, Shared Knowledge Exchange Services (ShaKEs), takes a different but equally compelling approach. A consortium of seven smaller Scottish institutions, ShaKEs aims to develop, test and evaluate shared professional services in contracts, legal support and intellectual property – but with a deliberate focus on disciplines and sectors that have been historically underserved by standard technology transfer office models. Its stated aims include repurposing the shared TTO model to fit non-biotech and non-engineering research cultures, and strengthening commercialisation capacity across creative industries, health, social care, tourism, gaming and other priority sectors. This is a recognition that the conventional TTO playbook (built around patents, licences, and spin-outs in the life sciences and engineering) does not serve the full breadth of university research. It addresses the observation that smaller institutions need shared infrastructure if they are to participate meaningfully in the knowledge exchange agenda.
So, what might this look like in Australia?
The Scottish context differs from ours in obvious ways. Scotland has 19 higher education institutions in a country of 5.5 million people; the SFC plays a dual role as funder and system steward that has no precise equivalent here. But the underlying challenge that the Fund addresses – that universities duplicate expensive back-office R&I functions that could be more efficiently and effectively delivered through collaboration – is at least as acute in Australia's system of 44 universities spread across a continent.
Consider trusted research. Since the University Foreign Interference Taskforce Guidelines were introduced, every Australian university has been building its own compliance frameworks, risk assessment processes and due diligence procedures. This has been done largely from scratch and largely in isolation. Some institutions have dedicated teams; others have bolted the responsibility onto already stretched research offices (or other parts of the institutional governance structure). The quality and sophistication of these frameworks varies enormously. A TReSI-style national network – developing shared toolkits, standardised processes, decision-support resources (or even sector-wide, expert due diligence capabilities), and genuinely useful case studies – would not only reduce duplication but would raise the floor across the sector. It would also provide government with greater confidence that the guidelines are being implemented consistently. This in turn could support a more mature and less reactive policy conversation about research security.
The ShaKEs model is equally relevant. Australia's regional and smaller metropolitan universities face precisely the same challenge as their Scottish counterparts: they produce research with genuine commercial and social value but often lack the specialist professional services infrastructure to translate it into impact. The traditional TTO model was designed for, and works best in, contexts where there is a steady pipeline of patentable IP in science and engineering. For institutions whose strengths lie in education, health services, the creative arts, Indigenous knowledges, agriculture or social innovation, a different model is needed. A shared knowledge exchange service (perhaps organised around disciplinary clusters or regional groupings) could open pathways to impact that currently remain closed, not because the research lacks value, but because the support infrastructure does not exist.
The regional commercialisation partnerships in Tay-Forth and Glasgow also have clear Australian parallels. The concept of geographically proximate universities pooling commercialisation expertise (or other specialised functions) is one that could be readily adapted – think of the concentration of universities in western Sydney, or the cluster in south-east Queensland, or the Canberra-based institutions. In some cases, informal collaborations of this kind already exist; what the Scottish model demonstrates is the value of providing catalytic funding to formalise, test, and sustain them.
What is most striking about the SFC's approach, however, is not any individual project but the philosophy underpinning the Fund itself. It starts from the recognition that in a constrained funding environment, the sector cannot afford to have every institution build and maintain its own bespoke version of every professional service. It provides modest, time-limited funding to prove that sharing works, and it places the onus on institutions to demonstrate sustainability beyond the initial investment. It does not mandate collaboration; it incentivises and de-risks it.
Australia's current policy conversation about university collaboration tends to default quickly to the big structural questions – mergers, federations, the future shape of the system. These are important discussions, and they were rightly front of mind at both the Universities Without Walls Symposium and the Solutions Summit. But the Scottish example suggests there is a rich middle ground between full institutional autonomy and structural consolidation: practical, voluntary, funded collaboration on the professional services that underpin research and innovation. It is less dramatic than a merger, but it may be more achievable, more scalable and, for many institutions, more immediately useful.
The question is not whether Australian universities would benefit from this kind of collaboration – the answer to that seems self-evident. The question is: who will fund the catalyst?
Dr Ross Mclennan is PVC Research Services at Macquarie University