Collaborate with us Partnership opportunities

Ranked as the second most innovative university in Europe, and in the top ten in the world, Imperial College London is home to world-leading academic researchers.

At Imperial, we value research that applies academic curiosity and rigour to real-world business challenges, bringing tangible benefits to society. Among the most effective ways for businesses to benefit from our worldleading academic expertise are to partner with us in collaborative research and to licence our technologies.

Imperial's Industry Partnerships and Commercialisation (IPC) team, together with other staff in the Enterprise Division, have a deep understanding of science and technology and strong commercial acumen. They help academics and businesses work together to develop new insights and technologies and translate them into commercial opportunities.

Imperial-Sainsbury’s partnership

In 2010, Sainsbury’s, one of Britain’s largest food retailers, established a partnership with Imperial College London to pursue research that results in reducing the carbon footprint of its retail activities, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Due to its success, the partnership has been renewed until 2025.

Imperial works closely with various Sainsbury's business units that are committed to decarbonising operations. The key focus areas of the partnership are:

• Decarbonisation strategy: carbon mapping, low carbon roadmaps, low carbon fuel trade-offs, techno-economic evaluation of investments, and property portfolio invesment plan

• Transport operations: energy efficiency, low carbon HGV fleets, impact of internet sales, research on logistics re-routing

• Energy building performance: benchmarking performance of buildings and energy systems, control strategies of building management systems, analysis and validation of energy efficiency and low carbon investments, redesign of engineering systems

• Energy technology review: appraisal and policy reviews of low carbon technologies for power, heat and cooling provision

• Sustainable ethical sourcing: carbon, energy, water, and waste reduction in food production and delivery processes

Project manager Dr Salvador Acha, Research Fellow in Energy Systems and Sustainable Transitions, said: “The partnership is a testament of how academia and industry can collaborate effectively to address problems that have no straightforward answer. We are working on developing innovative models and transferring our findings so Sainsbury’s can make sound low carbon investment decisions.”

Imperial-Hitachi partnership

In 2022, Imperial College London, Hitachi Ltd and Hitachi Europe Ltd signed an agreement to create the Hitachi and Imperial Centre for Decarbonisation and Natural Climate Solutions, to collaborate in fundamental and applied research to drive the transition to net zero pollution. The organisations will work together on selected research projects, reports and white papers on the technologies needed to achieve net zero and to train the next generation of netzero scientists and engineers.

Professor Mary Ryan, Imperial’s Vice-Provost (research & Enterprise) said, “There is greater urgency than ever before to tackle global pollution, of which CO2 is one of the biggest sources. This joint research centre will bring together world-leading scientists and innovators in decarbonisation and climate repair to develop new technology and solutions to the climate emergency. Imperial and Hitachi will work closely together to make significant advances in developing cleaner energy and this new centre will accelerate our work towards a zero-pollution future.”

Contact

Dr Francesca Pietra Director of Industry Partnerships and Commercialisation (Industry Partnerships Lead), Faculty of Engineering