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Further £12 million investment in new R&D will accelerate innovation and support growth

Funding opportunities

The Technology Strategy Board is to invest up to £12 million through three new research and development competitions that will stimulate innovation and support growth across the UK.

Scheduled to open in May and June, the three competitions are designed to accelerate the development of innovative new technologies in different areas – materials technologies for use in energy generation, transmission, distribution & storage, strategies to improve the resistance of buildings to climate change and ICTs for the manufacturing and construction sectors.

The investments will build on the Technology Strategy Board’s ongoing programme of activity to stimulate and support business-led innovation across the UK, through funding to aid the development of new technologies and a range of activity that fosters and encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing in a wide range of technology areas and business sectors across the UK.

The three new competitions are Energy Materials (£3m), Design for Future Climate (£2.4m) and ICT for high value manufacturing and construction (£7m). In addition to the new competitions, the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has offered to support a recently-launched funding competition by providing an additional £500,000 for innovative research and development projects.

The three new competitions, which will open in May and June, are:

  • Energy Materials: Up to £3m will be invested in collaborative research and development projects that address the application and demonstration of materials technologies for use in energy generation, transmission, distribution and storage. The focus of the competition will be on projects which address challenges in scaling up technologies, from initial laboratory proof of concept to small-scale technology demonstrations and pilots in a representative environment. The competition will open in May 2011.
  • Design for Future Climate: The new £2.4m investment will assist design teams in developing adaptation strategies to improve resistance to climate change of specific buildings they are already working on. The focus will be on improving building resilience and adaptation to climate change, thus extending the commercial viability of buildings. Projects must be on a specific building / refurbishment project with a client and design team both applying together for the funding. The funding covers all building projects >£5m spend. This is the second part of the competition. The first ran in 2010 and provided funding totalling £2.5m for 26 building projects worth £2.7bn. The second part will open on 31 May 2011 and funding of up to £2.4m will be available.
  • ICT for competitive high value manufacturing and construction: The £7m investment will stimulate the use of innovative ICTs in the manufacturing and construction sectors in which there are major opportunities to increase productivity and competitiveness. ICT has a major role to play in many critical capabilities in manufacturing and construction including and not limited to: automation; customisation; knowledge sharing across supply chains; and simulation and modelling. The focus of the competition will be on applying recent developments in ICTs to significant challenges in manufacturing and/or construction and on encouraging new and sustainable partnerships between businesses

The Nutrition for Life funding competition, which opens on 9 May, is intended to encourage the development of innovative processes and technologies with an emphasis on providing “healthy” and “safe” food and drink, and will support both feasibility studies and collaborative research & development projects.

Further information about the three new competitions will be available shortly on the competitions page of the Technology Strategy Board website – www.innovateuk.org

Out and About…

Prof Alan Fyall, Deputy Dean (Research and Enterprise) in the School of Tourism, reflects on how unstructured networking can benefit academic careers…

Continuing the theme of “talking to strangers”, first raised in the post by Dr Julie Robson on 10 May (Talk to Strangers), I remain a strong advocate of simply getting out and about so you are in a position to actually meet strangers in the first place. Julie is right in referring to networking as deliberate and planned and is right to suggest that clear objectives need to be set at the outset and then followed up. At an early stage of your career, however, I am a strong advocate of simply getting out, be it in the real or virtual world (http://www.academia.edu/ is a good place to start),  as unless “out there” you will never meet strangers and never migrate to networking.

To this day, I remain the very best of friends with colleagues from Edinburgh Napier and Aberystwyth universities having first met them at a late-night encounter at a conference dinner in Newcastle in the mid 1990s. Since then, we have written numerous papers and published four books together while we are currently in the process of writing some new material for the forthcoming REF. One of the books authored is on the theme of Collaboration which quite simply relates to autonomous organisations working together to meet a common goal. All the processes, structures of governance and detailed plans developed to achieve these common goals are virtually guaranteed to fail unless those collaborating get on personally ….. a little like the current coalition government but the less said about them the better!

It is too easy to remain in our offices and too complacent of us to accept that opportunities will simply appear be it to write a paper or be part of an application for a research grant. My advice is to escape the office on a regular basis, mingle with staff either in your own School or beyond, enjoy a chat over coffee or even register for that workshop, conference or event that you keep telling yourself you are too busy to attend. Getting out and about and communicating with your colleagues either at BU or further afield can lead to new friendships and hopefully a co-authored paper or two, a  joint research seminar or if you are really lucky a grant application. One of my best “chance encounters” occurred on a work trip to Malaysia back in 2007 when I shared a taxi from the airport in Kuala Lumpur to the centre of the city with the former Director of Tourism for Antigua & Barbuda. In the space of 40 minutes we discussed the state of tourism in the Caribbean and sketched out a PhD proposal while at the same time agonising over which schools to send our respective children. To this day my “KL Taxi” acquaintance remains a good friend and in her new position in the Caribbean is no longer a “stranger” but someone who is a strong advocate of BU, an employer of our students, a conduit to professional international networks and …… a potential co-author and PhD candidate when the pressure of work subsides!

Professor Alan Fyall

Deputy Dean Research & Enterprise

School of Tourism

Workshop on Information Discovery and Data Analytics Made Easy

DEC are hosting a workshop on Information Discovery and Data Analytics Made Easy facilitated by Prof. Michael R. Berthold, Konstanz University, Germany on 18 May.

TIME: 18th May 2011, 10.00 am – 1.00 pm,

PLACE: PG10, Poole House, Talbot Campus

The purpose of the event is to present methods and tools that can be used in processing large datasets and how to discover knowledge from them. Michael Berthold is a coordinator of the project BISON that is a research project funded by EC under the 7FP. He is also one of the founders of KNIME which is a user-friendly and comprehensive open-source data integration, processing, analysis, and exploration platform. So the goal of the workshop is also to start collaboration with Konstanz University and find out more about EC 7FP projects.

The workshop is open to all BU staff and PhD students as well. It will be of interest to all people who are involved in intelligent data processing. For sure it will be of interest for DEC staff: SMART Technology Research Centre, Creative Technology Research Centre and Software Systems Research Centre. I bielieve also that people from School of Applied Sciences will be interested.

Research areas that it covers include: intelligent data analysis, predictive modelling, complexity science, complex adaptive systems, knowledge discovery from data.

SCHEDULE:
10.00-11.00 – From Pattern Discovery to Discovery Support: Creativity and Heterogeneous Information Networks
11.00-11.30 – coffee break
11.30-12.30 – KNIME. Integrating Data, Tools, and Science
12.30-13.00 – Q&A Session
13.00-14.00 – Lunch

Prof. Michael R. Berthold’s Bio
After receiving his PhD from Karlsruhe University, Germany Michael Berthold spent over seven years in the US, among others at Carnegie Mellon University, Intel Corporation, the University of California at Berkeley and – most recently – as director of an industrial think tank in South San Francisco.
Since August 2003 he holds the Nycomed-Chair for Bioinformatics and Information Mining at Konstanz University, Germany where his research focuses on using machine learning methods for the interactive analysis of large information repositories in the Life Sciences. Most of the research results are made available to the public via the open source data mining platform KNIME.
M. Berthold is Past President of the North American Fuzzy Information  Processing Society, Associate Editor of several journals and the President of the IEEE System, Man, and Cybernetics Society. He has been involved in the organization of various conferences, most notably the IDA-series of symposia on Intelligent Data Analysis and the conference series on Computational Life Science. Together with David Hand he co-edited the successful textbook “Intelligent Data Analysis: An Introduction” which has recently appeared in a completely revised, second edition. He is also co-author of the brand-new “Guide to Intelligent Data Analysis” (Springer Verlag) which appeared in summer 2010.

For more information about workshop or to book a place, please contact: Katarzyna Musial (kmusial@bournemouth.ac.uk)

Vice-Chancellor’s Award: Research/Enterprise Project of the Year

The Design Simulation Research Centre (DSRC) in the School of DEC won the Vice-Chancellor’s award for the best research/enterprise project. The research, led by Prof Siamak Noroozi, Dr Philip Sewell and Bryce Dyer, is detailed below.

Members of the DSRC have used the results of previous research, funded by EPSRC and the medical charity REMEDI, to develop a research collaboration with Chas A Blatchford & Sons Ltd, the UKs leading prosthetics supplier.  This has resulted in the team being awarded an EPSRC CASE Award (£86k) to design and develop a ‘Smart Socket’ to provide lower-limb amputees with increased mobility and improved quality of life.  This collaboration has also led to the development of research to evaluate the performance of prostheses used by athletes in elite sport.

The underlying technology developed has other applications in civil, aerospace and marine engineering resulting in the initiation of two research projects with BAE Systems (PhD matched-funding – £26k and an EPSRC CASE Award – £95k).

IP rights have been negotiated with both companies meaning that a proportion of the income generated form any products developed will come to BU.

The research into the ‘smart socket’ and prosthetics fit has seen widespread public interest as the socket will help soldiers returning to active duty who had been injured in combat.  This has resulted in the following publications in the international press:
– Soldiers could get back to active duty with the help of a ‘smart’ prosthesis” was published in the Guardian, January 2011.
– Ahhh…Comfort! UK Research Takes Next Generation “Smart Limb” to New Level” was published in the International Magazine OandP Edge (Vol. 9, No. 5), May 2010.
– Amputee mobility fix is socket science” was published in the Engineer, February 2010.

The parallel stream of research in the ethical use of sports prostheses saw one of its researchers invited to join the International Paralympic Commitee Sports Equipment Working Group. This advises on legislation of equipment used by athletes at the Paralympic Games. Along with this, invitations in this area resulted in several keynote speeches on the centre’s research at international conferences in both Germany and Spain during 2010.  The team won the research prize at the Paralympics GB National Conference based on this research.

The findings from both projects and the resultant innovations will inform an area which has seen little attention historically.  As a result of this research the team was nominated for ‘Outstanding Engineering Research Team of the Year’ at the Times Higher Education Awards in 2010.

The research into prosthetics fit and the smart socket will potentially transfer into widespread practitioner health practise through Blatchford’s 30 UK prosthetic centres. As a result this will influence how amputees are rehabilitated both from treatment within the NHS but also specialised private clinics such as Headley Court which addresses military personnel both retired or seeking return to service.

The research into the prostheses in sport has resulted in across school collaboration between DEC and the School of Tourism. This relationship investigated novel ways of assessing amputee motion. One of the researchers was invited to join a working group within the International Paralympic Committee which will help inform the sports stakeholders and the wider community ahead of the 2012 London Paralympic Games.

Congratulations to the Design Simulation Research Centre! 😀

Good Luck & Congratulations Weekending 7 May 2011

Awarded & submitted bids

This week the messages of good luck and congratulation go to a varied mix of people and projects!  It is really nice to see a  large bid going into the Leverhulme Trust from Barry Richards in the Media School; an intriguing project about emotion while playing interactive games.  Zulfiqar Khan has also submitted a large bid to EPSRC which I am pleased to say was reviewed by the Research Peer Review Scheme.  In HSC Heather Hartwell and Clive Andrews has submitted bids for various pieces of well-being work and/or medical training while Rob Britton in applied Sciences has submitted something to the CABI.   On the congratulations side Julie Robson (Business School) has just secured a grant from Friends Provident for work looking at the relationship between pawnbrokers and their clients and Richard Gordon of the School of Tourism has secured a small piece of training with St. John’s School in Leatherhead.  So good luck and congratulations to all concerned!

 

Matthew Bennett

PVC (Research, Enterprise & Internationalisation)

Media School launch a world first!

The Media School recently launched the world’s first Professional Doctorate programme for professionals working in the Creative Industries. 
 
The Creative Industries in the UK has shown itself to be a diverse, vibrant, and expanding sector that contributed nearly £60bn to the UK economy in 2008. With this dynamic picture in mind, this practice-led programme is multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional in nature and aims to build new knowledge in the field of practice.
The Professional Doctorate: Creative Industries (DProf) programme is aligned with the Bournemouth University’s strategic plan in so far as it offers;

•         high quality education
•         aims to develop high quality professional practice
•         is likely to raise our public media profile
•         will potentially offer opportunities for Media School staff to engage in enterprise activities with businesses within the Creative Industries.
 
Dr John Oliver, the Programme Director and Acting Head of Research for the Media School, says that this is an exciting addition to the Media School’s portfolio of doctoral research provision and has already attracted high calibre professionals in the form of an Executive Director at Virgin Media.

Talk to strangers…

Guidance

Dr Julie Robson, Director of Enterprise in the Business School, reflects on the benefits of talking to strangers…

The ‘top ten tips to ..’ lists seem to be everywhere these days.  Tops ten tips to live longer, be happier, healthier and to find your ideal partner. One list that I came across recently in the business section of one of the Sunday newspapers promised to provide the reader with ten ways to be successful at work. Most of us have seen these lists before and to be honest the advice, although perhaps sound, was somewhat predictable:  i.e., deliver solutions rather than problems, be positive at work, be prepared to go the extra mile, etc.  The one tip that did stand out from the rest invited the reader to talk to strangers. This one probably stood out most as from a young age it’s the very thing we are advised against. Strangers are after all dangerous aren’t they? The rationale for talking to strangers was simply the more people you talk to the more you widen your list of contacts and knowledge of others and how they see the world.  Whilst I’m not necessarily advocating that we all go out and talk to strangers, in many ways talking to strangers is really just networking, albeit networking is more structured in terms of planning ahead, having a clear objective and following up afterwards.

networkingCould good networking then be the secret to being a successful academic? On reflection it’s a good way to identify new ideas, new ways to transfer knowledge to a wider audience and new partners for bids  Maybe talking to strangers, or at least new people, is good advice after all.

Dr Julie Robson

Director of Enterprise and Acting Head of Marketing

The Business School

For further information on successful networking see these two articles:
How to develop successful networking skills in academia
How to create an academic network

The Graduate School story part I…

Professor John Fletcher founded BU’s Graduate School in 2002. Here he reflects on what life was like before the Graduate School and where we have come to so far…

This blog is a reflection of the BU Graduate School story so far as the first incarnation of the Graduate School makes way for a new vision. When I was asked to set up the Graduate School in November 2002 as 0.2FTE of my time, it was in the wake of two RAEs where BU had been criticised for its lack of institutional support of its PGRs and a stream of complaints from our postgraduate researchers via the Student Union.  The first step was to examine the processes and systems in place across both campuses which quickly revealed that the seven Schools had seven different sets of processes and systems and, even more challenging, it transpired that we had somewhere between 80 and 147 PhD students but nobody quite knew how many.  When looking at the qualification rates at that time BU was only managing to get 11% of its PGRs through within 4 years and some researchers had been registered for more than 13 years!  Eight years on the Graduate School has implemented a Code of Practice and a set of processes that are now common across BU’s six Schools, overseen the introduction of new and innovative doctoral programmes and help improve our qualification rates. The systems that the Graduate School has put in place were deemed to be so effective that members of the panel that came to BU for the institutional audit contacted the VC to ask if they could adopt the BU model for their own institution.  BU was also one of the first handful of universities to introduce a credit bearing training programme for its supervisors, something that is now becoming commonplace across the sector. 

The support provided by the Graduate School to our PGR students has reduced the isolation and the complaints received from PGRs but there is still a long way to go to ensure that we have the correct systems in place to create a best practice research environment.  The introduction of myBUILD as an online research student log and compliance system met with considerable resistance but was innovative at that time and BU was one of the first institutes across the HEI sector to introduce an online log.  The lack of resources has meant that it was not possible to continue to develop the platform as the numbers of researchers increased but even though myBUILD has probably long gone past its “best before” date, it is vastly superior to the varied and somewhat unusual mixture of record keeping that was found in the individual Schools. There is an urgent need to redevelop the online system to make it more intuitive and better integrated with the other platforms across BU.

BU now has well over 300 PhD students and the qualification rates, particularly those of our part-time researchers, is vastly superior to that of 2002.  The Graduate School introduced the Annual PGR Conference which has been enormously successful and was an integral part of the Special Audit of PGR programmes, a working member of the EUA’s programme on improving the quality of doctoral programmes across Europe and was the hub for BU’s application to ESRC and AHRC for doctoral support bids (the former falling foul of the spending cuts but the latter achieving success). It is hoped that Graduate School will move from strength to strength as the importance of the postgraduate segment of our student body becomes more significant as we move forward in the 21st century.

International Conference on Culinary Arts and Sciences 2011

The International Conference on Culinary Arts and Sciences 2011 was held at BU from 12-14th April. Here Dr Heather Hartwell shares the conference successes…

The very successful International Conference on Culinary Arts and Sciences has just closed and attracted a wide range of international participants from 19 countries. The idea for such a conference was first discussed in late 1993 when the Worshipful Company of Cooks of London established a Centre for Culinary Research at Bournemouth University.  At the time it was felt there was a need for a forum that could bring together culinary artists and scientists who could present their research and generally discuss ideas within multidisciplinary and relaxed surroundings.  These initial thoughts led to the first Conference (ICCAS) which was held at BU in 1996.  It proved to be so successful that further conferences were held at BU in 1998, the University of Cairo, Egypt in 2001, Örebro University, Sweden in 2003, Warsaw Agriculture University, Poland, in 2005 and finally the Norwegian Hotel School, University of Stavanger in 2008.

Since its inception, the conference theme has always been Culinary Arts and Culinary Sciences.  The food and foodservice industries are a large and integral part of most economies but in academia they are invariably treated as separate and distinct disciplines.  These operate in isolation, often blissfully unaware of what each other are doing.  The primary purpose, therefore, has and continues to be to breakdown barriers which might exist and bring talented people together so that each can see, not only what the other is doing, but also to foster a better understanding of some of the issues, problems and concerns they have.  The programme in addition to developing the central thrust of the Conference, that is combining culinary arts and science, also delivered;

Foodservice (Catering and Hospitality)
Topics included: menus, menu planning, food variety and choice, foodservice in society, education, foodservice work and culture.
Food and Cultural Tourism
Topics included: wine and beer tourism and the various interactions between food, drink, culture and identity.
Nutrition, Food Science and Technology
Topics included: foodservice provision particularly with vulnerable groups, wellbeing and food safety.
Food Marketing, Food Habits and Consumer Behaviour
Topics included: eating and drinking habits and the interactions between food, drink and hospitality.

All submissions were subject to peer review by members of the International Scientific Advisory Board and we are grateful for their time and support.

International Scientific Advisory Board:
Prof. John S.A. Edwards, Bournemouth University, UK
Prof. Christina Fjellström, Uppsala University, Sweden
Dr Agnes Giboreau, Institut Paul Bocuse, France
Prof. Barbara Kowrygo, Warsaw Agricultural University, Poland
Prof. Svein Larsen, University of Bergen, Norway, & University of Stavanger, Norwegian School of Hotel Management
Prof. Herbert L. Meiselman, US Military, USA
Prof. Bent Egberg Mikkelsen, Aalborg University, Denmark
Dr Sara S.P. Rodrigues, Oporto University, Portugal
Assoc Prof. Peter Williams, University of Wollongong, Australia

We have always prided ourselves, and others have followed, by being able to publish delegates’ papers to coincide with the start of the conference.  So very often, conference papers never see the light of day until years after the event.  Once again we have published the refereed papers (ISBN 978-1-85899-273-0) and made them available at the time of registration.  Authors of selected papers have also been invited to submit extended versions of their work to Perspectives in Public Health and a special issue highlighting the conference will be published November 2011.

We are extremely grateful to the Worshipful Company of Cooks who have again been the main sponsor of this conference and look forward to 2013 when ICCAS will be held in Portugal and 2015 when it will be held in Auckland, New Zealand.

Conference Secretariat ICCAS 2011:
Dr Heather Hartwell, Assoc Prof
Foodservice and Applied Nutrition Research Group
Bournemouth University
 
Tel: +44 1202 961712
Email: ICCAS2011@bournemouth.ac.uk
Web: www.ICCAS2011.com

Wellbeing and impact

Dr Adrian Dawson, Director of Public Health (Bournemouth and Poole) would like to work with interested academics to translate research into policy, for example a geography masters student has just finished mapping the foodscape around primary schools which has directly impacted on planning policy of fast food outlets near schools. Another area of interest is ‘slow travel’.

He will come to Bournemouth University on Friday May 27th 9.30-10.30 in room PG 142 (Poole House) and would welcome the opportunity to explore with colleagues how the University and Local Authority could form closer research links. Ideally he would like to meet a representative from each School.

If you have any queries about the event, please contact Dr Heather Hartwell.

Success of Postdoctoral Development Programme in HSC

Guidance

The School of Health and Social Care has recently launched a new postdoctoral development programme aimed at those staff who have completed their doctoral studies. Prof Elizabeth Rosser (Associate Dean) provides an overview of how the programme works and the benefits to those involved…

A new postdoctoral development programme has commenced in HSC to offer those who have completed their doctoral studies the opportunity to move forward collectively as well as individually in their research endeavours. 

Initially the programme has focused on Nurses with the idea of running the programme again using an interprofessional group within the School, and maybe this could ultimately be a University-wide initiative with interschool activity?

The programme has commenced focusing on developing the skills of participants in the area of bidding for research grants, sharing the experiences of those with a range of bidding activity under their belts and encouraging all members to engage in undertaking one bid during the life of the programme.

This 6-month programme which commenced February 2011 has already made an impact.  One afternoon per month the group of 10 postdoctoral academics, drawn from each of the research centres in the School,  engage with the professoriate in learning the skills of bidding for research grants, sharing the lessons learned, as well as the challenges and the pitfalls.  Whilst there are key areas addressed during the programme, essentially the action learning group is informal with the programme content arising from queries and suggestions from the group itself.  The atmosphere offers an air of excitement and is informal and very informative with a buzz of spontaneity and active discussion.  The testimonials provided here show just how useful the programme has been to participants as well as to the HSC professoriate.

We need to do more of this….

Professor Elizabeth Rosser

Associate Dean (Nursing)

School of Health and Social Care

Writing competitive proposals event (London)

The Training Gateway is offering a ‘Total Proposals’ workshop in London on 15 June 2011.

Course overview:
Success depends on delivering a winning proposal – a strong selling document which the client will want to buy.  The seminar gives institutions not only the practical tools of proposal preparation, such as bidding plans and checklists, but also shows a range of winning techniques and “selling” devices that will positively differentiate your proposal from those of your competitors.

Attendees will:
– Refresh their approaches to the preparation of proposals
– Acquire new presentation techniques
– See how to give proposals a competitive edge
– Learn how to maximise the evaluation scoring of proposals.

This is an excellent opportunity for anyone involved in writing competitive proposals for research and enterprise funding!

Further information, including the booking form, can be found here.

Want tips on how to write a successful proposal? come to our session!

on May 11th 2011 Dr Martin Pickard, a specialist in writing and supporting research proposals from GrantCraft, will be visiting us to offer advice on how to write a successful funding proposal and much more! Four sessions covering different topics will be held on the day and you can attend as many or as few as you wish. To read more detail about each session and to reserve your free space, see our GrantCraft Research Workshop Day Event Page.

Economic Growth, Business & Higher Education

I am just back from a day in London at a posh briefing event which can be summarised as ‘the lunch not much cop, but the talks were surprisingly good and gave me lots to think about’.  So I thought it was worth sharing some of this while it was fresh in my mind.  David Sweeny (Director of Research, Innovation & Skills, HEFCE) started the day talking about REF and impact amongst other things.  One of the things that interested me was the return on investment from business interaction: £4-7 for every £1 spent which is quite good!  But impact is seen as a way of adding to the value of this investment further and the return on the RAE/REF which has consistently placed the UK ahead of the game.  For example, internationally we produce 5% of all the PhD’s globally, 7.9% of all research publications from just 1% of the World’s population!  Staff at BU play an important part in this.

It was the next talk that really made me sit up.  It was from a guy at Oxford Brookes (Kevin Maynard) talking about their approach to enterprise or to use his jargon ‘Knowledge Exchange’.  He was making the point that what is really crucial is that Knowledge Exchange – enterprise by another name – was not about wealth creation for an institution but about the ‘inflow’ of knowledge to inform it core businesses of research and education.  This is an important concept since he argued that it was central to: (1) employability, (2) course development, (3) ensuring research relevance to business/industry/society, and (4) increasing the breadth and capacity of the academic team and its professional development.  What he didn’t say, but is crucial here, is that it is central to a good student experience and staff motivation around enterprise.  I was really impressed by this since it is about the wider benefits to us as academics in engaging with industry/business rather than about simply generating income.  It is worth saying that they are also ahead of the game on that front too, but it is not the driver or what motivates academics to engage and engage they do.  One other point which also struck a cord was the idea of using CPD provision as a market tester for degree programmes; a dam sight cheaper to run up a couple of CPD courses than a whole degree and see it fail for lack of recruitment!

Paul Mason (Head of Development, Technology Strategy Board) was up next and talked about the re-vamp of their strategy due out later this month, but the bit I liked here was that he was talking about being ‘challenge led’ not ‘product driven’.  You start by finding out what the challenges are and then broker a solution based on the range of products or interventions you have available or can source.  This is basically what I have been talking about around BU  in the context of knowledge brokering as a way forward for us.  It is an important point; instead of working out what products we have to sell – CPD, different flavours of consultancy etc. – we need to first find out what challenges business face and want solving.  This fits with the need to be outward rather than inward facing in our approach in developing our new Research & Enterprise Strategy.  If we are to live the idea of providing a student experience in which employability is written large then links to business, industry and the professions are vital and we will need to up our game in these areas and being seen to provid real business/industry solutions is one way to do this.

There were several other speakers who talked about the importance of innovation and generating economic growth within future allocations of HEIF funding and the importance of promoting our success in applying and exploiting our research.  The importance of engaging with Local Economic Partnerships following the demise of the Regional Development Agency was also a common theme and something for us to reflect on as we develop our regional strategy.

The next speaker to make me sit up after my lunch time disappointment was Neil Bowering (Knowledge Transfer Account Manager, at Glasgow) he was talking about the Easy Access IP scheme which Glasgow have pioneered and received large amounts of fame and glory for.  His job is to exploit the IP in the large EPSRC portfolio at Glasgow.  Basically they give the majority of their IP, over 90%, away for free to any third party who can exploit it, keeping just a very small proportion to develop them selves.  It is a highly streamlined process on the basis that getting IP out and out fast is the key and that there is very rarely much money to be made given the cost of exploiting and developing products/ideas for market.  The real key is to make knowledge useful and work for economic growth and society by freely giving it up rather than developing it slowly/poorly, or trying to negotiate at length a stake in its exploitation.   It is the reputational gain that is the key factor and the ongoing dialogue with companies who take on that IP that counts.  Very streamlined, straight forward with four simple conditions on which the IP is given away. University resources directed were they need to be direct.  A fantastic scheme and model for us to look at; certainly one realistic to the nature and quantity of the IP we generate at BU.

Sir Tim Wilson former VC at Hertfordshire and a big wheel in a range of CBI and Business Engagement committees/reviews made a really nice point about a university education.  It is taken for granted by business/employers that graduates will have the key knowledge and the key technical ability, but what they are looking for more than anything are the intellectual skills that will set a graduate apart in the race for jobs.  The ability to critically think is central.   I am sure that our graduates have this but perhaps we should reflect more on how we develop and promote these vital skills?  This links with something that David Frost, Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce had to say; graduates need work force training.  He particularly was drawing attention to skills of team work, customer service, communications and self management on top of core competency in numeracy, literacy and IT. If you want to become a successful financial advisor, then you should really consider financial advisor life coaching.

The final bit that is worth drawing attention to is from Staffordshire University and their success in producing a ‘one-stop door’ for all business enquires and importance of creating a business sales force within a university that is grounded both in business speak and the culture of academia.  This sales team act as translators projecting a professional sales orientated pitch outwards (based on relationship marketing), while allowing academics to be innovative and creative in their own way.  Effectively they act as the interface between these very different communities and cultures.  There is a lot to learn from this model especially around business relationship marketing and the long lead times involved.  One aside was reference to placements as part of an extended recruitment selection process for graduates which is self evident but worth reflecting on.

So in summary there is lots of good practice out there to learn from and to develop this summer as we evolve BU’s future Research & Enterprise Strategy.