The University of Queensland (UQ) is the owner of the copyright of the 5R Leadership Development Programme (5R), which is informed by two decades of world-leading research led by Professor Alex Haslam AM in the UQ School of Psychology’s Social Identity and Groups Network (SIGN). In 2022, after multiple industry trials of 5R, UQ's commercialisation company, UniQuest, granted a worldwide exclusive licence (under strict quality assurance requirements) to Identify Leadership Pty Ltd, an entity founded by UQ PhD researcher Blake McMillan, specifically for the purpose of translating leading academic research to leading industry practice.

Identify Leadership make royalty payments from each 5R programme delivery to UniQuest, and these are distributed to UQ and to contributory authors in accordance with the University's intellectual property rights policy.

Identify Leadership’s Founder and Director, Blake McMillan, has been involved in 5R since the initial design and development work. As an organisational development (OD) practitioner working in high-reliability organisations (HROs), he became increasingly frustrated by the flaky (or lack of) evidence behind many OD interventions – especially when it came to leadership development training. There continued to be an overemphasis on developing the skills, attributes and competencies of leaders as ‘individuals’, failing to recognise leadership as a group process and often increasing the psychological distance between leaders and their teams.

In 2017, Blake commenced his PhD under the supervision of Professor Haslam, Associate Professor Nik Steffens (UQ) and Professor Kim Peters (Exeter) aimed at translating social identity theorising to structured interventions in various industry settings. Since then, more than 250 leaders have participated in 5R at HROs including the House of Commons (UK), Airservices Australia, Fletcher Building, Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, Metro North Hospital and Health Services and South East Queensland Water.

The licensing of 5R will enable Identify Leadership to expand the reach of the programme globally by creating a dedicated online technology platform and by establishing a 5R practitioner accreditation framework. Under the agreement SIGN will continue to undertake important leadership research utilising 5R and maintain ongoing industry trials with their partners.