Partnerships & Impact

The great challenges of our generation cannot be tackled by any institution alone. By forging new, deeper strategic collaborations, we can bring the best of our work to life.

This theme explored the Partnerships and Impact we want RMIT to have to 2025 and beyond.

The global RMIT community shared their thoughts on who we should partner with and how we will bring the best of RMIT to these partnerships to truly become the strategic partner of choice for industry.

We heard from staff, students, and industry partners through workshops and online conversations about the challenges and opportunities we are facing, and the next steps we need to take.

Key insights that emerged from the discussions include:

• Impactful, action-oriented partnerships: We seek to form partnerships with clearly defined impact and purpose and truly drive action through these to ensure mutual benefit for all parties. ​
• Solving great challenges will require collaboration: Collaboration is essential. We cannot solve our problems alone. We must bring the right players together and work together to design and build our future. Universities are uniquely placed to lower the costs of collaboration where the market has failed. ​
• An adaptive partnership and advisory model: The world is changing rapidly and the needs of our partners evolve at a corresponding pace. RMIT can support our partners in navigating this complexity and new knowledge but to do so, we will need to be a more adaptive organisation, able to ‘lean in’ from all across RMIT. ​
• Enhancing our learning experiences: Industry integrated learning remains RMIT’s unique proposition to both students and budding researchers.
• RMIT as a strategic partner of choice for Industry: RMIT is a unique University; a city-based institution with a full breadth of disciplines, particular strengths in design and technology and a reputation for an entrepreneurial approach. ​

Keep reading to see the community inputs and ideas on this important theme.

All of the insights gathered from the Reflections Phase will be incorporated into a Directions Paper, outlining the potential directions that will shape the final strategy and where we are heading as a University. The Directions will be launched in July!

Working in partnership is part of our DNA. Our partners play a critical role in our approach to and delivery of applied research and practical focus to learning and teaching. In the new, disrupted world, collaborating and working together has never been more important.

The great challenges of our generation cannot be tackled by any institution alone. Our applied research and innovation solutions have never been more necessary for our communities, our partners and the ecosystems we work in, and we need to forge new, deeper, strategic collaborations to bring the best of our work to life.

Our students need the differentiation, skills, knowledge and transformation that is offered by a practical work experience more than ever before to thrive in the uncertain world and workforce that they will graduate to.

Join us in a conversation about our Partnerships and the Impact we want to have to 2025 and beyond. Help us shape our direction around who we will partner with, how, and how we will bring the best of RMIT to these partnerships to truly become the strategic partner of choice for industry.