Hands up, please, anyone who at some point during the past few years has received a request to describe – and, if at all possible, salute – the fruits of a collaboration with the higher education sector.

Yes? Good. And now hands up, please, anyone who didn’t really know how to respond to such a plea.

Welcome to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the assessment exercise that has compelled academia to address the notion of “impact” head-on. More so than ever before, HE institutions are nowadays required to demonstrate the wider economic, social or cultural significance of their work – and engaging with industry is inevitably seen as a dependable means of achieving this goal.

"Amid the rush, amid the stampede, academia would sometimes do well to pause long enough to distinguish between a hastily arranged marriage of convenience and a genuinely productive relationship."

The ultimate penalty for failing to evidence impact is a reduction in funding. This has prompted both navel-gazing and alarm. In the run-up to the first-ever REF, the results of which were published last year, many members of the research community recognised they had never really engaged with audiences beyond their immediate peers; and even some who had reached out realised they hadn’t kept abreast of the full implications.

Hence all those out-of-the-blue reference requests. Hence many of their recipients perhaps feeling unable to offer the desired level of enthusiastic corroboration. And hence the scramble to establish new, stronger and more fruitful collaborations now.

It has become a very competitive affair – understandably so, given what’s at stake. Yet amid the rush, amid the stampede, academia would sometimes do well to pause long enough to distinguish between a hastily arranged marriage of convenience and a genuinely productive relationship.

Due consideration is especially advisable when paradigms are seemingly shifting with unprecedented regularity. All academic disciplines, not least those that have traditionally enjoyed positive links with industry, have to confront the challenge of continuously adapting in order to serve not only their own best interests but those of their stakeholders.

Operational research affords a classic example. It can trace its formal origins to the Second World War, when pioneers such as Patrick Blackett, who would go on to found the OR Society, rewrote the rules of military efficiency and effectiveness. Over the years it has grown to encompass logistics, training, infrastructure and civilian and business life and has encompassed industrial revolution, the rebuilding of Europe, management information systems, decision support systems and, most recently, business intelligence.

"The most successful collaborations tend to be long-lasting. As such, they’re usually illustrative of those involved growing, learning, adapting and developing together."

Now, as a result of the broader move from data scarcity to data ubiquity, OR finds itself in the age of analytics. One temptation in the face of such a major development is to adopt a bunker mentality; another is to resort to faddism.

The sensible retort, as the OR community is now discovering, is to retain your identity but be flexible. Keep your unique selling points but exhibit the openness needed to survive. By all means, stay faithful to your roots – but stay relevant, too. Accept that every discipline exists within an ecosystem and that every ecosystem thrives on a mix of rivalry and reciprocity.

Crucially, this also represents the ideal from industry’s point of view. When a branch of academia buries its head in the sand, shunning a new paradigm in the desperate belief it will somehow simply go away, industry is sold short; and when a branch of academia countenances the sweeping abandonment of its underlying principles and ethos, panicked into restyling itself beyond recognition, industry is done a disservice.

The most successful collaborations tend to be long-lasting. As such, they’re usually illustrative of those involved growing, learning, adapting and developing together. That’s why both sides should select their partners with care and resist the quick-hit lure of a scattergun approach. Let’s hope that if and when you receive a REF reference request in the years to come – the next exercise is due to be completed in 2020 – you’ll be confident that this has been the case.

Michael Mortenson is a member of the research team for ORATER, the Operational Research and Analytics Training, Education and Research project, funded by the OR Society and the University of Loughborough.