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Universities increase income from business collaboration

Business Engagement, innovation, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer

Technology in the hands

UK universities earned £4.2 billion from provision of services to businesses and collaborative research in the 2014-15 academic year, up from £3.9bn the previous year.
The latest Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey (2014 – 2015), published on 7 April by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, looked at all publicly funded UK higher education institutions and their interactions with businesses and other organisations.
In 2014-15, the largest chunk of this income was from collaborative research involving public funding, which reached £1.26bn, up from £1.14bn in the previous year. This was a change in emphasis, as in 2013-14 universities gained most of their income from contract research. However, contract research earnings also increased between 2013-14 and 2014-15, from £1.2bn to £1.21bn.

Universities also upped their earnings from courses for business and the community by £35m to £715m, from regeneration and development programmes by almost £22m to £205m, and from intellectual property by £24m to £155m.

The analysis also includes information on the number of spinouts and start-up companies created by UK universities, and shows that the number of graduate start-up companies created in 2014-15 was 4,160, lower than the 4,581 companies started in 2013-14.

However, the total number of active firms with some involvement from a higher education provider in the UK was 13,045 in 2014-15, up from 11,856 in 2013-14.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England will publish its analysis of the data for England later in the year.

This article was posted in Research Professional.

You can set up your own personalised alerts including news  on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in RKEO or view the recent blog post here.

 

 

Innovate UK launch new delivery plan – key sectors and funding opportunties included

Business Engagement, Funding opportunities, innovation, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer

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Innovate UK have launched their delivery plan for 2016/17 .

This  includes:

  • a new sector focus that is easier for industry, investors and government to work with
  • a 5-point plan to underpin activity across these sectors and drive productivity growth
  • clearer funding programmes that are easier to navigate
  • improvements to the way Innovate UK connects businesses to knowledge and partners
  • a stronger regional presence

With evidence of :”focusing ever more closely on scaling up SMEs” …

Clearer sector support has been established and these include four groups:

  • emerging and enabling technologies
  • health and life sciences
  • infrastructure systems
  • manufacturing and materials

Funding competitions for businesses are also to be simplified.

There will be 2 broad funding competitions covering each sector group per year, and 2 open competitions for applications from any sector or technology area. There will be other programmes and competitions in partnership with other government organisations.

Click here fore more information. 

Download the Delivery Plan.

BRAD Week: Mixed Methods

Training

BRAD wordleAs part of the BU Researcher/Academic Development (BRAD) Programme, a session on Mixed Methods will be run by Dr. Joanne Mayoh tomorrow (8/4/16) from 11:00 AM.

This session will provide a broad overview of the practical and philosophical aspects of mixed methods research.  The following areas will be outlined:

•Paradigmatic assumptions of post-positivist and constructivist/interpretivist research

•The key philosophical debates surrounding the paradigmatic stance of mixed methods inquiry

•Practical issues such as priority and sequence decisions, point of integration, write-up and dissemination

This session would be extremely useful for anyone thinking of using a Mixed Methods approach for their research, or those looking to develop their understanding of research paradigms more generally.

To book onto this course, please follow the following link.

Researching innovative pedagogy: An Evaluation of Team-based Learning

Centre for Excellence in Learning, conferences, Fusion, innovation

An Evaluation of Team-based Learning – 4-5pm in PG11, Wednesday 13th of April 2016

What is Team-based Learning?

Team-based Learning (TBL) is an example of the ‘flipped classroom’ concept whereby what might be described as traditional teaching content is accessed by students outside of the classroom while activities that might be termed ‘homework’ are conducted in class. In class, students have to answer questions as individuals to test them on their learning from the set pre-reading activities (termed the individual Readiness Assurance Test), then the same questions in allocated teams (team Readiness Assurance Test). Each team has a scratch card so that students can check if their agreed answer is correct (immediate feedback). Following that, teams then work on application exercises, where they have to apply their knowledge to problem-solving real-life scenarios.

Why bother with this approach?

TBL is thought to confer some advantages over traditional teaching methods in terms of student engagement and provides immediate feedback on student performance. While it does tend to mean some extra work for lecturers in terms of preparation activities, increased job satisfaction is commonly reported, and students report enjoying learning in this way. It is believed to improve critical thinking skills and in some cases improved exam performance has been reported. Further, this collaborative learning process promotes the importance of effective team-working, a skill desired of our graduates by many employers.

Do you want to find out more?

I am delivering a session on TBL at the CELebrate Conference 2016 next week. In this session, you will be introduced to TBL and get to experience a TBL session yourself! Quantitative (using the validated TBL-SAI instrument) and qualitative (focus group discussions) results from an evaluation of the implementation of TBL into a unit on the Adult Nursing degree programme will also be presented.

What to do now?

  1. Click here to watch this video before the session (it’s less than four minutes) -it’s a snippet from my online lecture on circulatory shock. Don’t panic if you’ve little knowledge regarding human physiology, it’s only to help illustrate the TBL approach – hopefully you’ll enjoy it!
  2. Then click here to book onto the session

Best wishes

Dr Jonny Branney

Congratulations to Prof. Hundley on her latest systematic review paper

Publishing, writing

This week Professor Vanora Hundley in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) published a systematic review form with her international collaborators working on early labour.   The paper is called ‘Diagnosing onset of labor: A systematic review of definitions in the research literature‘ and can be found it the Open Access journal BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth. [1]

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

 

Reference:

  1. Hanley GE, Munro S, Greyson D, Gross MM, Hundley V, Spiby H and Janssen PA (2016) Diagnosing onset of labor: A systematic review of definitions in the research literature. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 16: 71 http://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-016-0857-4

 

Your ORCID ID now visible on the staff profile pages

BRIAN, Publishing, staff profile pages

Bernhard Angele

Following an enhancement to the staff profile pages, your ORCID ID is now displayed as a click-able link.

ORCID is an international, interdisciplinary, open, not-for-profit organisation. Its core function is to provide a registry of unique, persistent, and resolvable person identifiers together with web services to enable interoperability through integration of identifiers into research systems and workflows.

The core issues underlying the ORCID initiative are the effective and appropriate identification of individuals who participate in the research community, and linking individuals with their research outputs, activities and affiliations. Solving this problem makes individuals more discoverable and assists researchers in finding resources and collaborators to support their work. Linking the researcher identifier with research outputs, activities, affiliations and other existing person identifiers extends interoperability and supports reporting.

Registering for a free ORCID ID takes less than 1 minute. Please click on this link to register now – https://orcid.org/register

To display your ORCID ID on your staff profile page, you must first update your Core HR portal with your ORCID ID.

After you have logged on to the system, click on ‘My Profile’ in a blue box as shown below:

HR core

This will open up your profile page and you will see ‘Other information’ at the bottom of a side bar on the left, click on ‘+’ to expand the menu and you will see ‘Orcid’ as one of the tabs.

.HR core 2

To add your ORCID iD, please click on the ‘add item’ tab

orcid

After the system is refreshed overnight, your ORCID ID should be visible on your staff profile page the following day. If you have any queries, please get in touch with Pengpeng Hatch, pphatch@bournemouth.ac.uk, 01202 961354.

Open Access Drop-in Sessions

BRIAN, open access, Publishing, Research assessment

Thinking about the next REF?

On 11th, 12th and 13th of April, RKEO will team up with the Library to provide Open Access Drop-in sessions. Please do pop in to get some hands on support and advice on making your research open access to comply with the HEFCE post-REF2014 Open Access Policy.

Monday, 11th April – 12.30pm to 1.30pm – S117, Studland House

Tuesday, 12th April – 12.30pm to 1.30pm – S117, Studland House

Wednesday, 13th April – 12.30pm to 1.30pm – S117, Studland House

Sign up to EU RSS News Feeds to keep up to date

Funding opportunities, Info Days

Hate that sinking feeling of finding out that you have missed out on a key funding Info Day or brokerage event?

Sign up now and be in the know.

The European Commission’s DG Innovation and Research provides subject-specific news feeds to help you to keep up to date with your research activities in your discipline and EU opportunities, including funding and networking events. To do this, the place to go is their RSS page. Instructions on how to add these to your news feed are also given on this page

Main topics include:

To see the full list and subsets of those listed above, please go to the main RSS page and find all the relevant RSS news feeds for you.

 

NERC Call for participants: Using natural processes to reduce flood risk workshop

NERCNERC, the EA and Defra are interested in identifying the key environmental research priorities related to using natural processes to reduce flood risk, with a view to potentially developing a collaborative research programme in this area. To support this process a scoping workshop will be held on 09 June 2016.  This is a great opportunity to contribute towards a potential funding stream at its inception.

For more information please see the following webpage: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/latest/events/list/flood/

British Academy Small Grants next call

Funding opportunities

british_academy_logoThe British Academy have informed us that the next round of BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants is now open and will be closing at 5pm on Wednesday 11th May.

They have written to us to say that during the last round they received a large number of applications (UK wide) with obvious errors that should not have been approved by the employing institutions.  They’ve provided updated BA scheme notes for applicants and BA FAQs which are also available on e-GAP and have asked that all applicants read the documentation carefully before starting their application.  BA receive 900-1,000 applications for each round of this competition and so will not correct errors but will instead withdraw the application from the competition.

If you’re interested in applying to this call then please inform your Funding Development Officer by 13th April.  We usually have a high demand for this call and so we will need to ensure that we have scheduled you in for costings and approvals, particularly as BA require RKEO to check your application and to electronically submit it on your behalf.  Therefore, the BU internal deadline for this call is 4th May.

Bournemouth University Clinical Research Unit 2016 Newsletter Now Available

bucru identity

The latest newsletter from the Bournemouth University Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU) is available to download here. Take a look at the successful grant applications we supported/won last year, and what else we got up to in 2015. There is also an update from our colleagues in the Centre of Post Graduate Medical Research and Education (CoPMRE).

Don’t forget, BUCRU can provide FREE methodological advice and support in designing your research project. We’re based on the 5th floor of Royal London House so feel free to pop in and see us, call us on 61939 or send us an email.

 

Creative England – latest funding opportuntites

Business Engagement, Funding opportunities, innovation, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer

Creative England is dedicated to the growth  of the creative industries. A key aim is to investin talented people across games, TV, film and digital media.
Latest funnds, garnts and loans currently available by Creative England and their partners can be found here.
If you are interested in submitting to any of the above calls you must contact RKEO with adequate notice before the deadline.

Please note that some funding bodies specify a time for submission as well as a date. Please confirm this with your RKEO Funding Development Officer

You can set up your own personalised alerts on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in RKEO or view the recent blog post here.

If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on Research Professional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.

VOOM 2016: Pitch to Richard Branson to win a share of £1M in prizes

Business Engagement, Funding opportunities, innovation, Knowledge Exchange

VOOM 2016 takes place over 14 weeks, including a huge public vote, a 29-hour Pitchathon (a Guinness World Records attempt, in fact), and a series of competitive face-to-face workshops.

Competition finalists will have the opportunity to pitch to Richard Branson and the six winning businesses will share over £1 million (€1.2 million) in prizes, plus additional support.

There are two categories:

  • START-UP – aimed at early stage start-up businesses
  • GROW – for businesses with revenue that are looking to grow

The winner of each category will receive social and PR support, a broadband and telecoms package, a carriage wrap on Virgin Trains, mentoring, financial advice, a £50,000 (€60,000) cash prize and much more. There are also prize packages for four runners up.

Crowdfunder are offering you the chance to run a crowdfunding campaign on top of (and as an integral part of) your competition entry. So while you are working hard to secure public support for your entry, you could also raise money at the same time.

The competition also allows you to put yourself forward for awards within your category:

  • The Impact Award – for businesses that put social and environmental impact, as well as profit, at the heart of their business
  • The Great Award – for businesses that fly the flag for Great Britain
  • The Crowdfunder Award – for those businesses that run a crowdfunding campaign in parallel with their competition entry

Key dates:

Public vote opens: 5 April 2016

Applications close: 10 May 2016

Voting closes: 23 May 2016

Find out more at https://www.vmbvoom.com

Research Blog Survey

Here at RKEO we are always trying to improve the services and information we provide to our audience and the research blog has been our main tool for communicating news to our audience. The research blog has been running since its first post back in March 2011, which makes it a strong 5 years old!

With this historic achievement of age it doesn’t  mean that there isn’t room for improvement. If you have the time it would be greatly appreciated if you could fill out thisquick survey about the research blog. This will allow us to improve the site and in turn provide a better service for you!

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NETNEP 6th International Nurse Education Conference, Brisbane

international, student research, Women's Academic Network

image
Four academics, Dr Susan Way, Dr Vanessa Heaslip, Ashley Spriggs and Dr Dawn Morley, from FHSS are presenting papers at the Nurse Education Today / Nurse Education in Practice Conference this week, 3rd – 6th April, in Brisbane. The conference is recognised as a leading nurse education event where cutting edge research and innovation ideas from across the world are disseminated. This year the conference has been expanded for the first time to include Midwifery Education.

The title of Dr Susan Way’s presentation is, ‘Leading with a SMiLE: Exploring a student-led clinic, practice education model for educational impact and service improvement’. The Student Midwives integrated Learning Environment (SMiLE) offers an alternative, reliable and collaborative student-led clinic practice education model for equipping midwives of the future with the knowledge, skills and competencies they will need to provide safe and effective postnatal care, to mothers, babies and their families. Early service evaluation of the clinic suggests that students found it benefitted their learning, built their confidence and gave them opportunities to develop their postnatal skills. Peer learning and teamworking relationships were also improved.

Dr Vanessa Heaslip and Ashley Spriggs present their collaborative study entitled “humanising the interview process”; an evaluation of service user/carers contribution to value based recruitment in a pre-registration adult nursing programme. The mixed-method evaluation analysed the perspectives of differing stakeholders (Candidates, SU/Carers, Academics and Practice Partners) regarding the role SU/Carer engagement in Adult Nursing Pre-registration interviews. Early findings from candidates have highlighted they value the involvement of SU/Carers in the interview process, SU/Carers add a “human dimension” ensuring a focus on the heart of nursing and its value base rather than the role of nursing and associated nursing tasks.

Dr Dawn Morley’s presentation focuses on the ‘ebb and flow model of mentoring students in practice’. Twenty one first year student nurses interviewed were insightful as to how their practice learning experience could be improved on their first placement.

The findings of her research highlighted the importance of consistently working with an expert who could encapsulate the “whole” of professional practice but who could also question and coach students through their learning experiences. The research suggested that this was best achieved through an “ebb and flow” model of mentorship where student and mentor were constantly negotiating short term learning goals and opportunities together that accommodated the challenge of workforce demands. By working and learning in this organic manner students were party to the professional decision making and observation of qualified nurses and were educated to a critical decision making level from the earliest opportunity in their clinical practice.

Professor Steve Tees, Executive Dean of the Faculty was also at the Conference in his capacity as one of the Editors of Nurse Education Today journal.