Escalation and Conflict Resolution Protocol

Gives the people drafting a research partnership's governance terms a signable escalation and dispute-resolution protocol with its forms.

What it does

Disagreements are normal in research collaborations. A milestone slips, the two sides read an IP clause differently, the budget runs over, or the working relationship frays. What damages a partnership is rarely the disagreement itself, but the scramble that follows, when nobody's sure who should decide, by when, or what happens if they can't agree.

The Escalation and Conflict Resolution Protocol settles those questions at kickoff, while trust is high. Both partners complete it and sign it. It sorts disputes into four types (technical, IP, budget and relationship) and three levels of severity, and sets out a clear path. Most issues start with the project leads, the most serious go straight to the steering committee, and an issue reaches executives only when it has to, with a named person and a deadline at every step. Our default is one week, four weeks, and eight weeks, and you can change any setting to suit your partnership.

It also covers the details that usually get missed: who stands in when someone is away, how each issue is recorded, how the protocol relates to your research agreement (the agreement still governs, and the research continues while an issue is worked out), and how you learn from each dispute afterward. Ready-to-use forms for raising a dispute, logging issues, and reviewing what happened come with it, along with a worked example.

Who it's for

The TTO director, sponsored programs director, and corporate alliance manager drafting governance terms together, and the two alliance managers who will run the Issue Log.

What's inside, section by section

• Cover, front matter, and adoption: a summary, the license, and how to put the protocol in place in six steps.
• 1. Dispute categories and severity: the four types of dispute, how to rate how serious each one is, and where each level enters the escalation path. If you use our Partnership Health Check, its results connect here.
• 2. Three-tier escalation: who handles a dispute at each level, how long they have, how to raise an issue, and how the protocol sits beside your research agreement, with a one-page summary of the whole path that's easy to pin up.
• 3. Named Roles Register: the people responsible on each side, with a stand-in for each.
• 4. Dispute-specific procedures: a one-page guide for each type of dispute: who convenes, who attends, what to record, and when the issue counts as resolved.
• 5. Documentation and learning: one record of every issue, a review after each serious issue is resolved, and a yearly review of the protocol itself.
• 6. Signatures and effective date: signature blocks for both partners, and for a third party if there is one.
• Schedule A, Partnership Parameters: the settings you can tailor, such as escalation deadlines, budget limits and the mediation route, with our default beside each.
• Annexes A to D: a dispute notice, an issue log and a post-resolution review, each also supplied as a separate Word file, and a worked example that follows a budget overrun from the first flag to its resolution.
• Glossary, methodology and references.

What you need to use it

Word or a compatible editor, the research agreement's title, number, notice clause and dispute-resolution clause, names and contacts for the eight roles on each side with their alternates, the contract year's approved budget, and the values you want in Schedule A. Most entries are names and contact details.

The methodology and the sources it cites

The protocol draws on the strategic-alliance literature (Kale and Singh, 2009, on the dedicated alliance function; Hoang and Rothaermel, 2005, on alliance experience), Gulati, Sytch and Mehrotra (2008) on planning for exit, De Backer and Rinaudo (2019) on communication practices between partners, and Stoppels et al. (2026) on steering-committee roles. The one, four and eight week cadence and every Schedule A default are Helikon Labs practitioner judgment, not an industry standard.

Where it sits in the Helikon Method

Unite phase (alliance formation): signed when the partnership is formed, then applied through Steward. Built from The Helikon Method, Project Management for Research Collaborations, with the book's conflict-resolution material.

Related workshop and bundle

Not included in a workshop; the related one is our Structuring the Partnership workshop, and the free step before it is our Multi-Stakeholder Governance Charter template. It belongs to our Alliance Formation Bundle, rolling out in batches.

License

Single-organization internal-use license: your organization may use it internally without seat limits, and may not resell or redistribute it. The licensed organization may give a copy of the protocol, completed for a single partnership, to the counterparty named in Section 6, and may share the Issue Log, notices and reviews produced under it with that counterparty.

Helikon Labs is not a law firm and this is not legal advice.