Professor David Price: The case for research collaboration

At this week's Guardian HE Summit 2011 session on 'The Future of Research Funding? Professor David Price, UCL Vice-Provost (Research), set out some thoughts on research collaboration between universities in the UK. Below he offers some further reflections. ?The UK has a history of a highly competitive research funding environment, which has helped to drive excellence in the research base. However, we face intensifying international competition in research and are seeing unprecedented investment in higher education and research by our competitors. This means that maintaining the UK's leading position in research will be increasingly challenging. We are faced with a problem of wanting to ensure continued research excellence and exploit all of the UK's research capacity with limited research funds. I believe that increasing research collaboration between universities is one way of addressing this problem, and is both necessary and desirable for a number of reasons.