Frequently Asked Questions

The Collaborative Project is a compulsory academic module that brings together all of our students from each of our seven disciplines to work on real-world organisation challenges. Last year saw 664 students work in 122 teams with 19 partner organisations over the course of a 10-week semester.

Our ambition is to deliver a unique and world-leading postgraduate experience that ensures our students are best placed to positively impact tomorrow’s workplace and society.

We are looking to collaborate with exciting, progressive and pragmatic organisations both big and small, and profit and not-for-profit, to join us on this journey of delivering a world-class experience that is mutually beneficial to all parties. We’ve typically partnered with organisations in and around London to enable in person interaction, though we’re always happy to explore opportunities to enable collaboration with partners from further afield. You can register your interest to collaborate with us by completing this form.

Case studies of some of our latest collaborations are available on our previous partners page.

No, we want to ensure barriers for collaboration are kept to a minimum and therefore we simply ask organisations to sign up to a Memorandum of Understanding that outlines key commitments from both parties. These commitments mostly relate to the time and energy required from an organisation to deliver the best project results.

As a minimum, we ask our organisations to have three points of in-person interaction with our students. The initial interaction would be a visit to the campus to expand upon the brief. Next, it is sometimes appropriate and beneficial for midway through students to visit your organisation, or a contextually-relevant location. Alternatively, students can meet you again at the University campus.

Finally, attendance at our Collaborative Project Show (where students from all projects present their results) is encouraged, and very much appreciated by the students. In between these times, a lead contact should be available on e-mail to answer any queries students may have while exploring the challenge. To ensure this is manageable, groups and organisations agree upon an appropriate communication strategy which might mean for example, a batched response once a week.

Each organisation will have up to six teams working on the challenge brief which will ultimately lead to the submission of a report from each team. From this, a selection of the best reports will be chosen to present at the Collaborative Project Show. It is hoped this output might be a stimulus for new ideas and ways of thinking, and it has not been uncommon for organisations to continue collaborating with some students, either through their dissertation or even employment. On a broader note, the Collaborative Project continues to bring together a diverse range of organisations into an ever-emerging collaborative community that has seen further collaboration occur both with the university and other partner organisations.

Please complete this form before 1 June 2018 to begin the process for the 2018-19 academic year. Applications made after 1 June 2018 may not be able to contribute to 2018-19 projects.

We’ll ask you to complete a brief submissions is form by 1 June 2018. Your suggestion for the brief will then assessed based on quality, relevance and alignment with the staff and student competences. Successful organisations will be notified as soon as possible and introductions will be made to your partnered academic Project Lead to enable any final refinements to the brief. Academic Project Leads will become your first point of contact for the duration of the project and will be introduced by 3 September 2018 at the latest. The Collaborative Project will commence from 10th October 2018. and will run for 10 weeks. The Collaborative Project show is normally held after Christmas.

We’re sorry if we couldn’t include your organisation in for the Collaborative Project but there’s plenty of opportunities to collaborate with us in other ways, including internship and project-based dissertations, internships, work experience, research, events and anything else that you may have in mind.