KTU Vice-Rector: Universities Should Be Business Partners, Not Service Providers

A university is not a service provider or an idea shop, says Edita Gimžauskienė, Vice-Rector for Strategic Partnerships at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU).

In 2025, KTU carried out R&D innovation projects and provided related services worth more than €4 million. Yet, however impressive the figures, financial and quantitative indicators reveal only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to university-industry collaboration.

The true value of partnerships between universities and public- and private-sector organisations emerges over time: through researchers working across both organisations, informal consultations and jointly nurtured talent. Put simply, such a partnership can change a company’s DNA rather than merely deliver a one-off product.

“Strategic partnership does not begin with counting our partners or cooperation agreements, but with asking where the university can make a strategic contribution,” says Gimžauskienė.

Partnerships Are Strongest when People and Expertise Are Shared

According to Gimžauskienė, cooperation is usually limited to a specific activity or project, whereas a strategic partnership involves a shared long-term ambition and lasting impact.

“Shared interests alone are not enough. A strategic partnership begins when both organisations recognise that they can create more value together than separately,” she says.

Vice-Rector recalls initiating a strategic partnership between KTU’s School of Economics and Business and the Bank of Lithuania while serving as the School’s Dean.

“We identified shared research topics with the bank and invited early-career researchers to join us. By pooling our funding, we were able to offer more competitive terms and attract talent from leading universities around the world,” says Gimžauskienė.

The partnership benefited both institutions, she explains: the university strengthened its research, while access to international academic expertise created value for both the bank and the university.

For a partnership to benefit both sides, she argues, organisations need to move beyond a transactional relationship – “what can you offer us, and at what price?” – towards shared ambition, co-creation and long-term planning.

“From an economic perspective, the most important measures of a partnership are the value it creates and its long-term economic impact – not simply the number of projects completed or agreements signed. If a university start-up grows, creates jobs and contributes to GDP; if companies develop new products or business ventures based on university technologies; or if our graduates use their expertise to help companies grow, that is the real impact of a partnership,” says Gimžauskienė.

Why Access to Knowledge Matters More Than a Single Product

Being close to a university can offer companies more than access to specific research or technologies. Research shows that interaction between universities and businesses strengthens companies’ capacity to innovate.

A study analysing more than 1,000 Norwegian companies, just over 200 of which collaborated with universities, found long-term benefits even for companies whose collaboration centred on education and informal activities rather than research. These benefits arose from so-called “proximity” – being close to an institution that creates knowledge.

Gimžauskienė notes that companies around the world recognise the value of this proximity and are willing to invest in it.

“For example, at the University of California, Berkeley, companies pay an annual membership fee to participate in the Berkeley Innovation Forum, a community for innovation leaders. There, they engage with university experts, explore the latest research and work through their own challenges together. These companies are not buying a specific product; they are paying for access to an environment where new knowledge and technologies are created,” she says.

This is particularly important in deep tech development, which often requires long-term research, expertise from different fields and close collaboration between business and academia. In such cases, a partnership does more than provide access to university knowledge: it becomes essential to turning ideas into practical solutions.

According to Gimžauskienė, the KTU Open Innovation Centre, opening this November, will take a similar approach. Its main aim is to build lasting links between the university and companies by anticipating future needs together, bringing together expertise from different fields and finding solutions that neither side could develop alone.

Universities Cannot Drive Innovation Alone

Discussions about university-industry partnerships often focus on universities’ perceived distance from the real world. Initiatives such as the Financial Times business school rankings, which assess not only academic standing but also whether research reaches wider audiences, encourage universities to engage more closely with practice. According to Gimžauskienė, universities are responding to market needs.

“A university can no longer be an ivory tower where knowledge is created in the hope that it will somehow reach society. Today, we must actively engage beyond our walls, understand the needs of business and society, translate knowledge into technologies and products, ensure its transfer and generate real impact,” she says.

Cooperation becomes a partnership rather than a series of separate projects only when the organisations involved are strategically important to one another, Gimžauskienė argues. She stresses that all parties must play their part: “Industrial companies also need to learn to collaborate, even with competitors.”

New medicines, faster cars, more efficient energy systems, a safer online environment and medical technologies that warn of impending illness – the ultimate beneficiary of collaboration between companies and universities is society.

Lithuania and MIT: Partnership for the Goals

According to Gimžauskienė, the partnership challenges differ across sectors. Businesses often focus on short-term goals, while public-sector organisations tend to view problems through the lens of their own remit, even though many of today’s challenges extend beyond any single sector.

Proximity, as discussed above, involves more than geographical closeness: it also encompasses social, organisational and intellectual similarities. Although universities compete for students, researchers and funding, they also collaborate, combining their strengths to pursue shared goals. One example is the Lithuanian Consortium for Engagement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

This means not only maintaining regular dialogue, but also creating value together through co-creation and co-investment. In such partnerships, the partners jointly shape research priorities, develop capabilities, create technologies, commit resources and take responsibility for the outcome.

MIT’s decision to partner with Lithuanian universities shows that Lithuania has valuable expertise and opportunities to offer.

“Lithuania is a small, dynamic and open economy where academia, business and the public sector can be brought together quickly, and new solutions tested in real-world settings. MIT itself has identified Lithuania as an environment of a manageable scale for experimentation in energy, cybersecurity, biotechnology and other fields,” she explains.

Gimžauskienė describes this partnership as a way to bring complementary expertise together: high-level research takes place across different niches, and the greatest impact comes from connecting them.

“That is why it is important not only to ask what Lithuania can gain from MIT, but also to identify what MIT and Lithuania can create together that neither could create alone,” says Gimžauskienė, KTU’s Vice-Rector for Strategic Partnerships.