Category / Research themes

CfE Welcomes a New Entrepreneur in Residence

The BU Centre for Entrepreneurship is delighted to welcome Arabella Lewis-Smith to our cohort of Entrepreneurs in Residence.

Jointly founding the Salad graphic design and digital consultancy in 2001 – aged 26 and with a background in fashion – Bella is living proof that, starting with just passion and a creative spark, anything is possible. The classic entrepreneurial success story, Salad has grown from humble beginnings to the award-winning agency it is today, with a team of 13 and working with the likes of Hall & Woodhouse, Olives et Al, Salomon and the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race. Alongside Salad, Bella was instrumental in the launch in 2007 of another venture, Pasture Naturals – which has since shown significant growth and established itself in the luxury washroom product market.

That both businesses have flourished despite a lack of direct experience of either sector speaks volumes for the power of intuition, enthusiasm and sheer hard graft. Above all, though, Bella is convinced that the most important ingredient is people, “I love what I do… the secret has been finding – and putting faith in – lovely, talented people who share that passion. In the early years of Salad I tried so hard to be corporate, slick, polished…. basically, someone I’m not. When I relaxed and started simply being me everything just clicked.”

Whilst for Bella the commercial objective is success – it will never be success at any cost. As an agency, Salad has never espoused a late night working culture – and Bella’s firm in her belief that, in order to do their jobs to the best of their ability, people need to be happy, to be treated fairly… and to have fun.

It’s a message with which Bella hopes to inspire others – and a key reason why we’re so excited she has accepted our invitation to participate in Entrepreneurs in Residence scheme.

For more information about Salad follow www.saladcreative.com To see the profiles of all our Entrepreneurs in Residence please click on www.bucfe.com/entrepreneurs/

NIHR funds research into community hospitals in England and internationally

Awarded & submitted bids, BU research, Research news, Uncategorized

A research team comprising RAND Europe and Bournemouth University have been awarded a research grant from NIHR to study Community Hospitals. Community Hospitals form an integral part of the NHS in the UK, this study looks at their distinct contribution to patient care. Community Hospitals come in all sorts of shapes, and can be located in rural parts of the country as well as in inner-city areas.  In the UK community hospitals differ in the nature and scope of services on offer; some provide maternity care, others (also) A&E services or day-surgery or care for the elderly.  There are a range of different models of ownership and management or the level of integration with other services.

The study will also explore what comparable models of community hospitals exist in other countries high-income countries, and what the NHS can learn from it.  Community hospitals may offer advantages for selected patients over larger hospitals, but unless we produce the research evidence we would not be able to tell which types of patients would particularly benefit.  Community hospitals have a long tradition of providing more integrated care, perhaps something we can learn from to improve other hospital services and hospitals.

This new study builds on the systematic review of community hospitals Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen (HSC) undertook with his colleagues in Scotland about a decade ago.1

For further details: http://www.rand.org/randeurope/research/projects/community-hospitals.html

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health

 

Reference:

  1. Heaney D, Black C, O’Donnell CA, Stark C, van Teijlingen E (2006) Community Hospitals – The place of local service provision in a Modernising NHS: An Integrative Thematic Literature Review BMC Public Health, 6(309).  Web address: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/6/309

Horizon 2020: Forthcoming Funding Opportunities for Creative Businesses

EU, Research themes

The Horizon 2020 programme is the major funding opportunity for research and innovation initiatives across Europe, and in 2015 there is nearly 600 million Euros available. If this is an area that interests you, it’s worth bookmarking the European Creative Business Network website .

Save the date!

Creative industries will benefit from some of this funding in the next round of calls published on the 15 October 2014, as the topics have already been announced. Here are some of the highlights for creative businesses:

ICT 19: Technologies for creative industries, social media and convergence
This funding aims to support Research and Innovation Actions, or Support for the development of, new or emerging technologies for digital content creation and to unlock complex information and media and interacting with them.

ICT 20: Technologies for better human learning and teaching
The development of digital technologies for learning are crucial to boosting innovation in education. This call will therefore focus on innovative technologies for learning, on underpinning interoperability standards and on the integration of different components into smart learning environments.

ICT 10: Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation – Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies.
By Collective Awareness Platform, the call basically means website or ‘portal’. They are interested in calls that pioneer crowdsourcing/crowdfunding or other forms of social innovation. They want to fund technological solutions to real world problems and are looking beyond the financial impact of the project towards the difference it makes to society.

More details of all of these calls are in the Draft Work Programme.

HSC student Jonny Branney’s main PhD findings published –

BU research, PG research, Publishing, Research themes

HSC PhD student Jonny Branney and his first supervisor Professor Alan Breen have had a paper published in the open-access online journal Chiropractic & Manual Therapies. It is entitled, “Does inter-vertebral range of motion increase after spinal manipulation? A prospective cohort study.” This is an important question in the field of manual therapy where the mechanisms behind the clinical effects of manual treatment are often poorly understood. This PhD aimed to shed some light on the mechanism of this particular therapy commonly utilised by chiropractors, physiotherapists, osteopaths and some doctors. It is hoped that improving our understanding of the mechanism will ultimately improve the targeting of spinal manipulation to those expected to benefit from it.

Please click on the link if you’d like to read the study:

http://www.chiromt.com/content/22/1/24

And email Jonny if you’d like to find out more!

jbranney@bournemouth.ac.uk

This PhD was funded by a grant from the European Chiropractors’ Union and Jonny is also very grateful to the BU Graduate School for a PGR Development Award and a Santander Mobility Award that allowed him to present his work at international conferences. His supervision team included Professor Jenni Bolton (AECC) and Dr Sarah Hean (HSC).

Visiting Spanish historian researches PR archives

EU, Uncategorized

Since June 30, Professor Natalia Rodriguez Salcedo of the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain has been a visiting scholar at BU, based in the Corporate & Marketing Communications academic group in The Media School.

During a four-week period, she has undertaken detailed research in the archive of the International Public Relations Association (IPRA), which was the first major PR association established in Europe in 1955. The IPRA archive was developed by Professor Tom Watson in 2011.

It is an important source of information about PR’s evolution in the immediate post-World War 2 world and the field’s international expansion in the second half of the 20th century.

“Archives like that of IPRA are always difficult to find and provide essential material for PR historians,” said Professor Rodriguez Salcedo. She has also undertaken research at BU’s Library, including its special collection of historic PR books. As a result of her research, she and Professor Watson are exploring future research collaboration on the development of the PR sector in Europe, especially philosophical and practices approaches that evolved separately from the US.

Professor Rodriguez Salcedo also observed Professor Watson’s editorial and reviewing roles in developing a six-book series, ‘National Perspectives on the Development of Public Relations’ which is being published by Palgrave-Macmillan. She will be a contributor to the fifth book of the series, ‘Western Europe Perspectives’, with a chapter on the history of public relations in Spain.

During her stay Professor Rodriguez Salcedo, who is a member of the European Public Relations History Network, attended the 5th International History of Public Relations Conference at BU on July 2-3, at which she delivered a paper on the formation of the first Spanish PR consultancy and chaired a conference session.

Professor Natalia Rodriguez Salcedo discusses the IPRA archive with its founder, Professor Tom Watson

 

The virtual and the field: enhancing visualisation in archaeology using serious game technologies

BU research, Fusion, Research news

Forensic Experiemtn Level 1The FIF funded collaborative project between the Creative Technology and Archaeology Frameworks has produced its first output.

 

The aims of the project are to:

  • Initiate collaboration between the Creative Technology and Archaeology and Anthropology academic groups.
  • Enable Games Technology students to perform interdisciplinary projects with Archaeology students (e.g. the creation of virtual 3D environments or 3D artefacts).
  • Provide Archaeology and Anthropology students with 3D research, teaching and learning resources produced with serious game technologies.

 

In the first of a series of projects a Games Technology student has collaborated with a Forensic Archaeology student to produce 3D environments for use in experiments investigating how individuals interpret and respond to features in the environment. We are now looking to participants to perform the experiment. Please email djohn@bournemouth.ac.uk or i7208298@bournemouth.ac.uk if you want to take part in the experiment.

BU presenters at Joint World Conference on Social Work, Education and Social Development, Melbourne, Australia

BU research, Fusion, Women's Academic Network

Dr Sara Ashencaen Crabtree and Professor Jonathan Parker presented their research at the Joint World Conference on Social Work, Education and Social Development, in Melbourne, Australia, 9th-12th July 2014.

In a well-received paper concerning the importance of student social workers learning about the causes, impacts and ways of working with the consequences of terrorism, and the problems of rigidity in the current English curriculum, conference delegates were introduced to a two-year study which revealed that student participants felt that a more extensive and sensitive range of intervention tools needed to be taught and deployed via a coherent and nuanced understanding of the geo-political dimensions surrounding the construction of ‘global terrorism’, together with its potential impact on local populations and vulnerable communities. Research findings highlighted the importance of earlier generic community-based and therapeutic approaches, which were favoured above contemporary neoliberal emphases in English social work education concerning assessment, safeguarding and social policing.  Addressing these findings would demand a much needed rebalancing of the curriculum to reinstate essential practitioner skills transferrable to a range of situations and crises – skills that have long been viewed as integral to the social work role by the international community. This research was published earlier in 2014 in the journal Social Policy & Social Work in Transition, DOI: 10.1921/4704030201, http://essential.metapress.com/content/26170w57262444gp/ and was reported in the Guardian on 25th June 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2014/jun/24/how-can-social-work-education-address-terrorism?CMP=new_1194.

The second presentation reported aspects of the highly successful UK-Malaysian study of reactions to and cross-cultural learning from international placements, research that has challenged preconceived notions of anti-oppressive practices and demonstrates the need to move beyond post-colonial analyses of Western social work towards a post-post-colonial dialectic of shared and cultural appropriate practices. This research, funded by a British Council PMI2 grant, took place over three-years, with three separate cohorts of students supported by two Malaysian universities, Universiti Sains Malaysia on the peninsular and Universiti Malaysia Sarawak in Borneo. The success of this study which combined research rigour focusing on  pedagogy with student mobility opportunities has been affirmed by the British Council as one of their most successful funded projects. This study has to-date produced a raft of publications: 2 book chapters, 5 peer-reviewed papers and 5 international conference presentations, including one keynote lecture. The latest research paper has just been published in the prestigious European Jounral of Social Work, Jonathan Parker, Sara Ashencaen Crabtree, Azlinda Azman, Dolly Paul Carlo & Clare Cutler (2014): Problematising international placements as a site of intercultural learning, European Journal of Social Work, DOI: 10.1080/13691457.2014.925849.

Jonathan Parker and Sara Ashencaen Crabtree

WordCamp comes to BU

This weekend BU has been playing host to a fantastic group of the nation’s best and brightest WordPress Developers for the 7th annual WordCamp UK event. The event is a chance for the community of WordPress developers to come together, share ideas and experiences, and provide each other with support and advice.  Over 100 people attended the event, coming both from the local conurbation, and from further afield – in particular one gentleman had come all the way from Spain!

Arriving Saturday morning I had the basics of WordPress down, having previously developed a free website for a local community event that consists of a few different pages and a blog feed.  Talks have been submitted to the running order by the attendees of the conference in advance, giving people a selection of topics to pick and choose from depending on their interests.  Sessions have been hugely varied, for example: “A beginners guide to web accessibility”, “Learning to sell your services as a web designer”, “Designing with data”, and “How not to launch a startup”.  One of the most helpful sessions from my perspective as a novice WordPress user was a series of 5 minute lightening talks on topics such as the importance of password security (to find out how long it would take a hacker to crack your password head to How big is your haystack?), how to set up a developer event, and a poetic recital of how to problem solve your website issues.

As well as attending the talks I’ve also benefitted from one of one tuition from other attendees on how I can develop sites offline and what plugins I could add to sites to make them more interesting and useful for the end user, all for no extra cost.  Overall this has been a fantastic insight into the power of WordPress and how I can use it to support my own projects and events at a minimal cost.   Considering tickets were just £10, I think there has been fantastic value in the weekend’s activities and I would recommend to anyone with an interest in WordPress (professionally or privately) to consider attending future WordCamps around the country. 

SDRC newly appointed visiting professor

Fusion

SDRC has developed significant portfolio of industrially funded research, national and international collaborations and visiting faculty. BU has recently appointed Professor Bob Cripps as visiting professor.

He is currently a Director of Longitude Consulting Engineering part of London Offshore Consultants (LOC) which was established to provide independent, high quality marine and engineering consultancy to the shipping and offshore industries.

Professor Cripps was previously Director Engineering College for BAE Systems Surface Ships responsible for developing and maintaining BAE Systems Surface Ships academic and engineering reputation as being world class and he was responsible for setting up University Technology Partnerships at six key UK universities.

Prior to this, Professor Cripps was Technical Director at VT Halmatic responsible for all technical aspects including boat design/engineering and composite development. He was Engineering Manager at RNLI for 18 years responsible for the design and development of all classes of lifeboat (offshore and inshore), launching equipment and moorings. He was instrumental in the development of the latest generation of lifeboats namely, Severn, Trent, Tamar and Atlantic 85 class lifeboats. He was also responsible for all research and development undertaken by the RNLI and he established the Advanced Technology Partnership between the RNLI and the University of Southampton in 2000.

Professor Cripps is a Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor in the Principles of Engineering Design at the University of Southampton. He is well known for his work in the design and development of small craft and the use of composite materials in marine applications and this was recognised with the award of an Honorary Doctor of Engineering from Bournemouth University in 2005. Particular areas of interest and expertise are the development and integration of methods and processes to enable designers to utilise latest technical developments simply at an early stage of the design process.

Professor Cripps was instrumental in introducing different NDE methods into the construction and in-service inspection of composites hulls and this was recognised by The British Institute of Non-Destructive Testing with the 2002 NEMET Award for outstanding examples of effective use of NDT.

He was a Senior Ship Surveyor with Lloyds Register of Shipping for nearly 13 years in the Research and Development Group and the Plan Approval Department. Graduating in 1976 from University of Southampton with a BSc.(Hons) Ship Science, Professor Cripps is also a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects (FRINA), Fellow of the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (FIMarEST), Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute (FCMI), a Chartered Engineer (CEng) and European Engineer (EurIng).

If you would like to know more about the SDRC academic activity, please contact

Dr Zulfiqar Khan (Associate Professor)

Director SDRC

South Asian midwifery at ICM 2014

BU research, Publishing, Research news, Uncategorized

Photo from UNFPA Lao PDR

In early June I published a short overview of Bournemouth University’s contribution to the ICM (International Congress of Midwives) conference in Prague (Czech Republic) (see: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/06/05/cmmph-strong-presence-at-icm-conference/ ).  In addition we highlighted the Nepal contribution in a separate BU Research Blog (http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/06/03/46-sharma-s-sicuri-e-belizan-jm-van-teijlingen-e-simkhada-p-stephens-j-hundley-v-angell-c-getting-women-to-care-in-nepal-a-difference-in-difference-analysis-of-a-health-prom/ ).   Today a belated update of our presence at the Special Session on South Asian Midwifery at the ICM conference last month, as I just received photos from our friends at UNFPA Lao PDR.

South Asia posters at ICM conference (photo: UNFPA Lao PDR)

One of the speakers at the South Asian Midwifery session was our friend Kiran Bajracharya, president of the Midwifery Society of Nepal (MIDSON).  Several of our posters describing our work in Nepal were on display.  Bournemouth University friends were involved in the organisation of the event, such as Swedish midwife Malin Bogren and the editor of the newly launched midwifery journal Journal of Asian Midwifery, Dr. Rafat Jan. The session was concluded by another BU collaborator Petra the Hoope-Bender of Integrare.

Professor Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

17thJuly CHIRP workshop – Online behaviour change interventions: Introduction to LifeGuide

Research themes

LifeGuide is open-source software that is designed to allow researchers with little or no programming experience to develop, modify and evaluate web-based interventions.  At the workshop you will get a chance to learn about LifeGuide’s features, see examples of existing LifeGuide interventions and gain hands-on experience of using the software.

You can learn more about the LifeGuide software here: https://www.lifeguideonline.org/ Although it is not essential, you may find it useful to visit the website and perhaps try out the tool so you can bring any specific questions you may have with you. 

Places on the workshop are limited and booking is essential, it is open to any members of staff but they do need to book a place by emailing me on swilliams@bournemouth.ac.uk

Please reply if you have any questions or would like to reserve a place at the workshop.

LifeGuide workshop advert

Creative England Teams up with Playstation on Accelerator Programme

Funding opportunities

 

As part of its ongoing support for the games industry in England, Creative England’s  GamesLab Campus programme will invest a total of £250,000 into five Games companies (£50,000 each) to support the development of new and innovative entertainment experiences on PlayStation®3, PlayStation®4 and PlayStation®Vita.

This package of investment will be complemented by a bespoke programme of business support and other technical and fringe benefits including the provision of PS3, PS4 & PS Vita Dev Kits1.

This announcement was made earlier this week at the Develop Conference 2014 , For more information, including how to apply, will be available shortly on our Games section Follow GamesLab on Twitter at @CEGameslab.