by Dr Helen Turner (AI.RDN+ Co-Lead and Midlands Innovation Director)
Over the last twenty years, I have spent much of my career helping universities work together. Whether supporting researchers, technicians, technology transfer professionals or innovation leaders, one lesson has emerged time and again: universities make the fastest progress when they tackle shared challenges collectively.
AI is transforming higher education at remarkable speed. Universities across the sector are grappling with common questions around doctoral training, supervision, assessment and governance. Yet AI is evolving too quickly for any institution to have all the answers. Responding to the opportunities and challenges posed by AI seem an area ripe for collaboration.
At Midlands Innovation, we have learned that collaboration is about far more than sharing expertise. It is about building communities that strengthen the whole system.
Through MI TALENT, universities worked together to support the development and recognition of technical professionals. While the programme delivered valuable training, one of its most important outcomes was the network it created. Technicians developed relationships across institutions, creating new sources of advice, support and shared learning. The result was not only better-skilled individuals but a more connected and resilient community.
We are seeing similar benefits through Forging Ahead, our commercialisation programme. Peer learning activities for technology transfer professionals are helping participants develop new skills, but they are also building relationships between institutions, sharing good practice and creating greater alignment in approaches and processes. Over time, this reduces duplication and strengthens the wider commercialisation ecosystem in our region.
These experiences have shaped how I think about AI and the creation of AI.RDN+.
Midlands Innovation and Yorkshire Universitiesare leading AI.RDN+, a partnership involving twenty universities supported by Research England. The programme is exploring how doctoral researchers are using publicly available AI tools and will develop evidence, guidance and training to support students, supervisors, examiners and institutions.
The research outputs will be important, but I suspect one of the programme’s most valuable legacies will be the community it creates. By bringing together research developers, doctoral training professionals and academics from across twenty universities, AI.RDN+ will create a network of people learning from one another in real time.
As we have seen through MI TALENT and Forging Ahead, these connections can become as valuable as the formal outputs of a project. They build confidence, create resilience and help good ideas spread more quickly across the sector.
Artificial intelligence is moving too quickly for universities to solve its challenges in isolation. By sharing evidence, building relationships and developing solutions collectively, institutions can move faster, reduce duplication and create better outcomes for researchers and students alike.
For me, that is the real promise of AI.RDN+: not simply helping universities understand AI, but helping them learn about how to respond to it together.
*(I used GenAI to support the drafting of this blog)
****************************
If you would like to share your thoughts on the article or share the article itself on LinkedIn, please click here.