Universities are being encouraged to take a more evidence-based approach to international partnerships, with a new service designed to help institutions identify which research and transnational education relationships are actually worth pursuing.
Cormack Consultancy Group (CCG) has launched Collaborizer, a partnership intelligence service that combines institutional publication and funding data with human analysis to identify potential research and TNE collaborations.
The premise is relatively straightforward. Universities have no shortage of potential international partners, but they do have a shortage of time and resources to investigate all of them properly.
For institutions under increasing pressure to demonstrate the value of international engagement, that creates a familiar problem. A university can have hundreds of partnership agreements, relationships with major institutions and a presence in key international markets, but still struggle to identify where the next genuinely productive collaboration might come from.
Collaborizer is designed to address that gap by moving the assessment of potential partners beyond rankings, reputation and broad subject-level similarities.
According to CCG, the service analyses current publication and funding profiles to identify areas of research complementarity and then goes a level deeper, identifying the active researchers behind those areas. The analysis can also connect research themes with potential funding instruments and sponsors.
The result is intended to be a ranked portfolio of opportunities rather than another long list of institutions for an international office to work through.
International partnership strategies have traditionally relied heavily on existing academic networks, institutional reputation, rankings, previous collaborations and the relationships of individual academics.
Those approaches remain valuable, but they can also reinforce the partnerships a university already knows about.
The CCG case studies suggest that there can be considerable opportunity sitting outside those established networks, including within existing TNE arrangements and in countries where a university already has a physical presence.
From agreement to action
One of the clearest examples comes from a Scottish technological university and two sub-Saharan African partners.
The three institutions had already signed a trilateral research partnership agreement. The problem was what came next.
Rather than another round of institutional discussions about where the partners might collaborate, Collaborizer generated thousands of potential researcher connections. Following human screening, 68 researcher bridges were approved and the work was organised into nine research themes.
Four were classified as higher-confidence opportunities.
Among the areas identified were trustworthy AI and governance for research infrastructure in resource-constrained settings, explainable AI for network-threat detection, and widening participation and student retention.
The analysis also identified something the partners had not previously considered: an opportunity involving bioprocessed insect-cereal composites and African food security.
For CCG, the significance is not simply the number of matches generated. It is the ability to move from an institutional agreement to conversations between specific researchers around specific research questions.
That potentially changes the role of the international office from maintaining a portfolio of relationships to actively identifying where academic activity can generate deeper value.
Testing the whole market
Another case study demonstrates the scale of the approach.
A Welsh research-intensive university with an existing campus presence in Central Asia wanted to understand where its strongest research opportunities sat across the national system.
Rather than focusing on a handful of familiar or high-profile institutions, the analysis compared the university against three national flagship universities.
Around 45,000 candidate researcher pairs were assessed before the analysis was reduced to a development portfolio of around 25 themes.
The resulting opportunities ranged from turbine multiphysics and fluid-structure interaction to low-resource language technologies, quantum-dot photonic computing, gravitational-wave cosmology and satellite-to-ground urban air-quality monitoring.
Three areas were identified as the highest-confidence entry points: wind-turbine control, ADHD gene-environment research and integrated quantum-dot photonics.
The broader message for universities is that having an international presence does not necessarily mean having a clear international research strategy.
A campus, TNE operation or longstanding institutional relationship can provide the infrastructure and access. The harder question is what academic activity should be built around it.
TNE as a pathway to research
That question is particularly relevant as universities look at how existing TNE relationships can evolve.
TNE has often been primarily associated with teaching delivery, student recruitment and market access. But those relationships can also create foundations for research collaboration if there is genuine academic alignment behind them.
CCG used Collaborizer with a Welsh applied university to examine existing teaching and research relationships with overseas partners.
The analysis identified 62 approved researcher bridges across 19 themes, including five higher-tier and 14 developing opportunities.
The findings also demonstrated that different TNE partners could offer very different research pathways.
With a leading economics university in South-East Asia, opportunities centred on tourism, heritage, applied economics and econometrics.
With a science, technology and maritime academy in North Africa, the opportunities were more closely aligned with circular economy implementation, climate-responsive housing and secure machine learning for smart-city systems.
The value, therefore, was not simply identifying that two institutions had research interests in common. It was identifying what kind of relationship might realistically be built from the existing connection.
That is potentially an important distinction for universities trying to extract greater value from their international portfolios.
238 institutions, one ranked agenda
Perhaps the most striking case study involved a Scottish technical and engineering-led university operating a branch campus in Southeast Asia.
The university was already established in the market. Its challenge was to determine which institutions across the country’s research system offered genuine opportunities for collaboration.
Collaborizer assessed 238 institutions, comparing them against the university’s research footprint.
The analysis identified around two dozen institutions with meaningful research alignment, eight crossover themes and five priority areas of untapped potential.
Importantly, the exercise did not simply reward the institutions with the greatest volume of shared research.
One national energy-sector technical university emerged strongly because its research aligned with the client’s distinctive strengths in geoenergy and carbon capture. It was already a warm relationship, with 78 joint papers.
Elsewhere, institutions with substantial shared research volume had very little co-authorship, suggesting a different kind of opportunity.
One of the largest gaps identified was in antennas, radio frequency and metamaterials, where several institutions were producing significant research but had essentially no history of collaboration.
That finding illustrates one of the more interesting aspects of the model.
No existing relationship does not necessarily mean no opportunity.
In some cases, the absence of co-authorship may simply mean that two institutions have never systematically explored what they could do together.
From more partnerships to better partnerships
CCG chairman Charles Cormack said the challenge facing universities was increasingly not finding potential partners but deciding which relationships deserved investment.
“Universities have enormous potential for international research collaboration and TNE, but increasingly they don’t have the capacity to explore every possible partnership or opportunity,” he said.
Cormack said Collaborizer was intended to help institutions make decisions based on evidence rather than reputation, existing relationships or broad subject similarities.
That reflects a broader challenge facing international education.
As universities become more deliberate about international activity, the conversation is shifting from how many partnerships an institution has to what those partnerships actually deliver.
A long list of memoranda of understanding may look impressive, but it says relatively little about whether academics are collaborating, whether students are benefiting, whether research funding is being won or whether a TNE relationship is developing into something deeper.
The ability to identify those opportunities at scale could therefore become increasingly useful, particularly as international offices face competing demands and constrained resources.
CCG says Collaborizer is not intended to replace academic judgement or established university networks. Its recommendations are human-screened, with the review status of findings made explicit.
Data can identify patterns and potential connections, but it cannot on its own establish whether two academics will work well together, whether an institution is strategically compatible or whether a proposed collaboration will ultimately succeed.
What it can potentially do is narrow the field.
Instead of asking international teams to investigate hundreds of possible partners, the approach provides a basis for deciding where to start, who to speak to and what the conversation might be about.
For universities increasingly expected to demonstrate a return on their international engagement, that may prove to be the more valuable proposition.
The future of international partnerships may not necessarily belong to universities with the most relationships, but to those that are better at identifying which relationships have the potential to become meaningful ones.
CCG says Collaborizer can be used as a standalone research-partnership mapping exercise or combined with its expertise in international partnerships, TNE, research funding and market entry.
In effect, the service is designed to take universities from a familiar starting point, who could we partner with? Towards a more consequential question: where is the evidence that a partnership could actually work?
