Is your partnership actually ready to work?

The basic Collaboration Readiness Assessment from The Helikon Method, The Innovation Imperative: 30 statements across six dimensions (governance, culture, processes, resources, track record, and network), scored on a 1-5 scale. Returns a plain-language report with a recommended next step. About 20 minutes. Free.

When the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities interviewed leaders at 22 universities and 16 companies, the barrier they mentioned most often was a misalignment of goals and incentives (APLU, 2022). In our own exploratory survey of 20 faculty at five major U.S. public research universities (Flowers and Roadman, 2024), 80 percent had taken part in an industry partnership and 85 percent were interested in more, yet the most common way they had found a partner was a personal connection. The gap is less about interest than about alignment and the infrastructure to find and run partnerships.

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.