Is your partnership actually ready to work?

Most R&D partnerships stall before the first milestone, and the bottleneck almost never turns out to be funding. Our research across five major U.S. public research universities (Flowers and Roadman, 2024) found that 80 percent of faculty respondents had partnership experience and 85 percent were interested in more, yet partner discovery happened “by chance and is personal” with no systematic infrastructure on either side. The gap between intent and outcome is governance, alignment, and infrastructure, not interest.

Readiness is the sum of six dimensions: whether you have a decision-making structure, whether your team culture can actually hold a cross-sector partnership, whether your processes handle the speed mismatches between academic and industry calendars, whether you have the people and budget to execute, what your partnership history shows, and how deep your relevant network reaches.

Answer 30 statements on a 1-5 Likert scale (Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree). You’ll get a PDF showing your score on each dimension, the band that score lands in (Early Stage, Developing, Established, or Mature), and the recommended next step for the dimension that scored lowest.