Category / Business Engagement

MOD establishes defence innovation initiative

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The UK’s Ministry of Defence has set up a project intended to help government researchers collaborate better with colleagues in industry and academia and to transform how the armed forces deal with future challenges.

Defence secretary Michael Fallon announced on 12 August that the initiative would include an Innovation and Research Insights Unit to anticipate emerging trends in technology and analyse the implications for UK defence and security. The unit would “informing critical decisions to maintain our military advantage and protect the UK”, he said.

Catalyst fund: innovation in learning and teaching

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The Higher Education Funding Council for England invites applications for its catalyst fund: innovation in learning and teaching. This supports small-scale projects to develop innovations in learning and teaching for university provision.

The council is particularly interested in proposals which:

•develop curriculum innovations from interdisciplinary research, interdisciplinary professional practice or both;

•respond to employer demands for advanced skills or knowledge;

•develop use of learner analytics for particular pedagogic purposes.

Click here for more information.

If you are interested in submitting to  this  call you must contact your  RKEO Funding Development Officer with adequate notice before the deadline.

For more funding opportunities that are most relevant to you, 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.

Prosperity partnerships – EPSRC, business and universities

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The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council invites applications for its prosperity partnerships – EPSRC, business and universities. These enable existing, strategic, research-based partnerships between businesses and universities to undertake the co-creation of a large-scale, technology readiness level one to three research programme.

Consortia may be formed of multiple businesses and universities, but an existing strategic relationship must be in place between the lead business and university partners. Applications must be led by a business partner, who may lead on only one bid but may be a contributor to other bids. Universities may be involved in more than one bid.

For more information including timescales click here.

If you are interested in submitting to this  call you must contact your  RKEO Funding Development Officer with adequate notice before the deadline.

For more funding opportunities that are most relevant to you, 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.

Research and Knowledge Exchange Development Framework: Working with Business Pathway

The Research and Knowledge Exchange (RKE) Framework: Working with Business pathway focuses on developing interactions with a business audience.  Please see previous blog posts in the Development Framework for information on the separate pathways.

The aim of the ‘Working with Business’ pathway is to develop your skills to connect with the business community including networking, identifying project funding – including Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) and building project teams involving businesses.  Sessions have been planned with these key areas as a focus.

Further information on this pathway will appear on the OD website including booking links over the summer.  Updates on this pathway and the wider RKE Development Framework will appear on the BU research blog.

Technology in the hands

Small companies offered £1.2m to seek out global partners

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Innovate UK has launched a fund to encourage small British firms to work with international businesses and to help them enter global markets.

UK businesses looking to create international business networks can apply for funding to enable commercial research and innovation partnerships. It will also help businesses explore ideas for future collaboration.

Innovate UK is funding this competition. It is open to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The funding will enable SMEs to carry out short feasibility studies and spend time abroad. The competition will encourage UK firms to create long term partnerships with overseas companies. It will also help them gain a better understanding of collaborative opportunities.

Competition information

  • The competition opens on 5 August 2016
  • The deadline for registration is noon on 21 September 2016
  • The deadline for application is noon on 28 September 2016
  • A UK SME must lead the project
  • A UK SME can carry out the project on their own or work with other UK partners
  • Only UK SMEs will receive funding
  • Innovate UK will fund projects with eligible costs of up to £30,000
  • Businesses may receive funding of up to 70% of their total project costs
  • Projects should last up to 4 months

Click here for further information and how to apply.

Creative Industries – new 5 year strategy

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The Creative Industries Council’s new 5 year strategy proclaims amazing news for the Creative Industries. With the sector growing at 8.9% a year (making it the second fastest growing sector), the UK’s Creative Industries is vital to the UK’s economy.

The 2016 strategy refresh is demanding but attainable, with a focus on driving economic value, through support for business growth, job growth, exports and inward investment.  The sector seeks to build on existing trade relationships and to unlock the potential of the sector in international markets with a primary focus on the USA and key territories in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.  Review the Nesta/Creative England report on the Geography of Creativity . This includes rich content about  regional opportunities.

The Geography of Creativity in the UK

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In this report, in partnership with Creative England, NESTA have used the latest data and official definitions to map the creative industries in the UK. The  goal is to provide a data resource to demonstrate the economic significance of the creative industries across the country, and inform policies to strengthen them further.

Findings

  • The creative industries are becoming more important in local economies across the UK. Between 2007 and 2014 they became more important in local business population in 9 out of every 10 locations.
  • Identified 47 creative clusters across the UK. London and the South East are important components of the UK creative industries, but so are the North, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These clusters grew their creative employment by 28% between 2007 and 2014
  • The UK’s geography of creativity isn’t only about ‘hip creative cities’,  clusters in creative conurbations across the country have also been identifed.
  • Creative communities in different parts of the country are working together across cluster and administrative boundaries. The geography of the UK creative industries is an interconnected system.

Policy recommendations

  • Support the development of clusters outside of London and the South East
  • Continue efforts to share the benefits of London’s status as a global creative industries hub across the UK
  • Local Enterprise Partnerships and universities should consider what more they can do to address the strengths and weaknesses within their particular area, such as an over reliance on large firms or growing links between graduate talent pools and creative clusters
  • Networks of UK creative industries should strive to maintain their global reach.

(This work contains statistical data from ONS which is Crown Copyright. The use of the ONS statistical data in this work does not imply the endorsement of the ONS in relation to the interpretation or analysis of the statistical data. This work uses research datasets which may not exactly reproduce National Statistics aggregates.)

Download the full report.

Events for innovators, entrepreneurs and investors

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Innovate UK supports many events that bring together innovators, successful entrepreneurs and investors. At the events information and advice  is available highlighting the type of support and funding that is currently available. Find and more and register for upcoming events:

Venturefest Manchester – Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, M2 3WS
Date: 21 September 2016
View speaker line up
Find out more & register >>

Venturefest Wales – SSE SWALEC, Cardiff, CF11 9XR
Date: 28 September 2016
View the full programme
Find out more & register >>

Venturefest Scotland – Glasgow Science Centre, Glasgow, G51 1EA
Date: 1 September 2016
View the agenda
Find out more & register >>

New Scientist Live – ExCeL London, E16 1XL
Date: 22 – 25 September 2016
We will be attending the New Scientist Live event where our Chief Executive, Dr Ruth McKernan MBE, will be talking about Therapies of the Future on Friday 23rd September.
See what’s on
Find out more & register >>

Low Carbon Vehicle Event 2016
– Millbrook, Bedford, MK45 2JQ
Date: 14 – 15 September 2016
Our stand will showcase some of our many successful LCV projects and be an opportunity to meet the Innovate UK and KTN team.
View the Seminar Programme
Find out more & register >>

Innovate 2016  – Manchester Central
Date: 2 – 3 November 2016.
Innovate 2016 is  Innovate UK’s  flagship event showcasing the very best of innovation talent and global opportunities for businesses.
Find out more & register >>

Why not update  Innovate UK with your location so you can receive relevant communications including events in your area Update my location>>

 

Interactive documentary launched – Psychiatric Genetic Counselling Research Project

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Media and Journalism students Chelsea Nwasike and Grace Brewer have developed an interactive documentary to illustrate the project including the two recent workshops that are helping to transform approaches to psychiatric genetic counselling.

Genetic counsellors and researchers who attended the European and international workshops were interviewed and included in an interactive platform, along with videos from Dr Kevin McGhee and a ‘mental health jar’ demonstration video.

Dr Kevin McGhee explained: “By expanding healthcare professionals understanding of genetics and mental illness and providing a way for people around the world to view these discussions from the workshops, we want to raise awareness and encourage people to take better care of their mental health.

Funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) find out more about this project on the BU Research Website.

 

Digital Economy – Emerging and Enabling Technologies Workshop

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As part of its strategy development for Emerging and Enabling Technologies, Innovate UK are in the process of re-thinking its strategy for the Creative Economy.

The strategy will show the opportunities for UK companies, the barriers to realising those opportunities and the intervention that Innovate UK and its partners will take to help UK companies to achieve success.

There are two worksops being run in London on 17 August.  In this workshop, Innovate UK will share its early, straw-man thoughts , see input, and together design a strategy which describes a future of working together to achieve complementarity, joined up working and great successes for UK innovation.

This workshop is necessary for Innovate UK to launch its strategy at Innovate 2016 on the 2 November.

To register click the links below:

Morning workshop

Afternoon workshop

New business and university collaboration platform

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konfer has been developed to faciliate easier access to the university sector for the business community, by collating a large amount of information all on one platform. UK universities are bursting with innovation  and  world-class academics who are keen to collaborate with industry, charities and the public sector.

konfer was created by the National Centre for Universities and Business (NCUB) to make this astonishing wealth of expertise and resources more accessible. Working in partnership with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Research Councils UK (RCUK), konfer brings knowledge and growth to businesses, valuable exposure for university talent, and future prosperity for the UK.

 

When a business owner spots an opportunity, konfer supports the journey from finding a research partner and funding to planning and co-creation. It does this by giving direct access to:

  • 8000 academics
  • 11,000 facility and equipment listings
  • 800,000 web pages from university sites and social media
  • 22,000 YouTube videos from university channels
  • 10,000 news, funding and events articles from curated feeds
  • 50,000 publicly funded research projects

konfer brings knowledge and growth to businesses, valuable exposure for university talent, and future strength for the UK economy.

Learn more

 

NCUB want  konfer to be as useful as possible, so  access to the  Alpha version of the site is available. No need for passwords or user names – just dive straight in. https://konfer.online

This means things may be a little rough around the edges and there may be some bugs to be  squished ! But,  hope  by sharing the site early,  hope to consider suggestions fro improvements. Planned live date is erly in the New Year.  Feedback can be emailed  konfer@ncub.co.uk . For more information on this platform and NCUB in general contact Jayne Codling within RKEO.

DfT Transport Technology Research Innovation Grants now open

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The Department for Transport (DfT) opened on  Monday (25 July)  the latest round of its Transport Technology Research Innovation Grant (T-TRIG) to support technology innovation in the transport sector.

The grant offers 100% funding for projects in three separate calls:

  • An open call for new transport ideas
  • A targeted call for solutions to challenges in aviation security
  • A targeted call for Intelligent Transport Systems

T-TRIG provides seed funding to early-stage science, engineering or technology innovations that have potential for advancing the UK transport system.

The funding scheme is open to anyone, typically micro, small and medium-sized businesses or academia, to support research projects that could lead to the development of successful new transport products, processes or services.

KTN is supporting these calls, including a series of webinars, led by DfT officials that will provide details of the opportunities, answer questions and help guide potential applicants on how best to present their ideas.

Successful applicants will be awarded fully-funded grants of up to £25,000 for the open call. For the targeted calls, there’s a budget of £150,000 to fund three to six projects in Intelligent Transport Systems targeted call and £300,000 for the Aviation projects.

On the other hand, are you buying or selling an aviation company? You can then even find aviation businesses that are for sale, there are several pages online that list them like https://trufortebusinessgroup.com/aviation-businesses-for-sale/ so have a look.

Schedule of the Competitions

This next round of T-TRIG will be launched on Monday 25 July 2016.

The entry deadline for all three calls will be Monday 22 August, with projects running between 19 September 2016 and 9 January 2017.

Webinars this week for direct access to Department for Transport

To find out the full details of these grants and for the opportunity to ask questions to DfT officials, please register for one or more of the following webinars:

The schedule for these competitions requires a relatively short time to prepare applications, so early registration and preparation of questions is recommended.

For further details see the Department for Transport’s Competition page Transport-Technology Research Innovation Grant (T-TRIG)

If you are interested in submitting to any of the above calls you must contact your  RKEO Funding Development Officer with adequate notice before the deadline.

For more funding opportunities that are most relevant to you, 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.

Defence Academic Pathways – Validation and verification of intelligent systems

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PraxisUnico is working with the Defence Academic Pathways (DAP) group on this free event for the research community to explore research needs in the validation and verification of intelligent systems.

Intelligent systems may offer great benefits in being able to adapt to a changing environment and offer complex, rapid decision making made beyond human reach. Research into intelligent systems is needed to enable and improve confidence in their safe and secure employment in the public space. There is a clear need to ensure that intelligent systems will operate as expected, exhibit desirable behaviours and deliver the required outcomes in rapidly changing environments.

This workshop hopes to identify those future research themes required for the correct validation and verification of intelligent systems whilst ensuring that potentially autonomous behaviour remains under human control, and will employ a number of scenarios where the use of an intelligent system or groups of intelligent systems would provide value. Breakout groups will explore each scenario to determine the evidence required to sufficiently validate and verify safe and secure intelligent systems.

The workshop aims and objectives are;

  • To understand the validation and verification challenges raised by each scenario.
  • To determine the research themes required to meet these validation and verification challenges.
  • To inform legislative bodies on any necessary verification and validation solutions to ensure safe and secure employment of intelligent systems.
  • To provide a forum that can be used to strengthen research applications submitted to the EPSRC via the Standard Mode.

DAP is a partnership directed by Dstl and includes major industrial partners BAE Systems, GE, MBDA, Leonardo UK, NPL, QinetiQ and Thales, together with representatives from EPSRC, Innovate UK and a University liaison advisor.

The DAP partnership represents a significant number of the 15 most frequently cited companies from the Research Excellence Framework (REF) impact case study analysis and the data on collaborative projects compiled by the Dowling Review. The companies represented by DAP have a proven track record for effective university-business collaboration; DAP was created to facilitate this process through e.g. assigning IP rights arising from collaborations to the university partner as standard.

This event, supported by DAP, is free of charge, and will feature workshops to explore research needs in the validation and verification of intelligent systems. The event will take place at the UK’s technology and innovation centre for intelligent mobility, the Transport Systems Catapult (Milton Keynes)on Thursday 8 September 2016.

Who should attend and why:

The workshop should be attended by research professionals involved with intelligent systems, machine learning, robotics, or the validation and verification of software systems. The intention of this workshop is to scrutinise potential exploitation paths to support the definition of future research themes. For further information please contact DAP@mail.dstl.gov.uk

About PraxisUnico

supports KEC in the UK, and works with key stakeholders and partners to promote best practice in the sector

Successful Knowledge Exchange and Commercialisation (KEC) is essential to the economic growth of the UK.

PraxisUnico develops knowledge exchange and technology transfer professionals with our world-leading training, connect members and stakeholders at our events and promote best practice for our sector. We facilitate interactions between the public sector research base, business and government; bringing together key stakeholders to debate, educate and inform.

 

Big data – helping cities solving planning challenges

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A data platform developed with support of Innovate UK is helping big cities to plan services such as transport, education and housing.

A data science business is helping London to plan its services thanks to a new decision-making platform. Mastodon C won a £2 million SBRI (Small Business Research Initiative) contract in a ‘future cities’ competition to find ways of meeting the challenges faced by urban areas.

Mastodon C is working with the Greater London Authority to develop and test its Witan platform in a project supported by Innovate UK.

Witan provides modelling tools and data management processes to help solve real challenges faced by cities and their partners, and is already being used by 33 London boroughs. Witan is being used by the London boroughs to see how latest housing projections will affect the spread of population up to 2041. The work used to take specialist staff weeks to do but can now be generated in minutes. The results will help council officials to plan many services including where the demand is likely to be for services such as school places, waste disposal, and housing.

Francine Bennett, chief executive and co-founder of Mastodon C, said: “Our motto is ‘big data done better’. That has two meanings. What we do with big data, we do very well technically. We are also interested in better applications of big data and data science, building applications that improve people’s lives as well as work for the business.”

Click here for the full story.

 

 

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Robotics and autonomous systems: apply for innovation funding

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Competiton is open now!

There will be a briefing webinar on 27 July 2016

Find out more about this competition and apply

In brief:

Innovate UK is inviting businesses to apply for a share of £5 million to develop innovative applications of robotics and autonomous systems. Innovate UK and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) are to invest up to £5 million in robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) projects.

The aim of this competition is to help UK companies explore new RAS opportunities. It will enable them to develop capabilities for applications in many sectors of the UK economy.

We are looking for proposals that will speed up the development of RAS technologies towards demonstration and commercialisation.

Proposals can be for systems that are physical, for example a next generation robot. They can also be digital only, for example an automated decision-making system.

Robots that are independent of human control can learn, adapt and take decisions. These could revolutionise our economy and society over the next 20 years. Disruptive technologies related to RAS include mobile internet, automation of knowledge work, advanced robotics, and automated and autonomous vehicles.

These technologies have the potential for an annual economic impact of US$9.8 to US$19.3 trillion in 2025. The UK has world-leading strengths in the underlying science and engineering that contributes to RAS. It also has access to the markets that could exploit them.

Key information:

  • There will be a briefing webinar on 27 July 2016
  • The registration deadline is noon on 19 October 2016
  • The application deadline is noon on 26 October 2016
  • Projects should range in size from total costs of £50,000 to £500,000
  • Projects should last between 6 and 15 months
  • You must complete the work and incur, pay and claim for all costs before the end of March 2018
  • A business must lead the project
  • Projects with costs of £100,000 or above must be collaborative

Find out more about this competition and apply.

If you are interested in submitting to this  call you must contact your  RKEO Funding Development Officer with adequate notice before the deadline.

For more funding opportunities that are most relevant to you, 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.

Sensor-integrated urometer for measuring real-time urine output (HEIF funded project)

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The project team from the Faculty of Science & Technology has received Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) to undertake a series of activities aimed at encouraging university and the public sector to harness the benefits of advanced assistive technologies. (The HEIF  project started last year and is due to finish at the end of July.)

The nature of HEIF funding encourages knowledge exchange and support to develop a broad range of knowledge based interactions between universities and colleges and the wider word, which result in economic and social benefit to the UK.  In current clinical practices, urinary output measurement and supervision are prevailing medical intervention treatments for patients suffering from critical illness, aging bladder, post-surgery urination difficulties and long-term bedridden. However, the urinary output is still measured and monitored manually by healthcare staff, which is extremely time-consuming and prone to undesirable human errors commonly, arose in these repetitive and monotonous tasks. The project aims to invent an automatic device for remotely monitoring of urinary output, which features real-time remotely wireless catheter fall-off and flow rate monitoring, urinary output minute-by-minute monitoring and real-time states visualization.

The project team is made up of a number of researchers and students from multidisciplinary domains in addition to academics. The team (Prof Hongnian Yu, Mr Arif Reza Anwary; Mr Daniel Craven, Mr Muhammad Akbar, and Mr Pengcheng Liu) has recently presented their three developed prototypes at the collaborator’s site (Royal Bournemouth Hospital). The feedback and comments from the hospital staff are very positive. Dr Simon McLaughlin, the project collaborator from the Royal Bournemouth Hospital, said ‘The project looks to have progressed well. The work is excellent and the one of the prototypes is almost ready to deploy.’

The team  hope to continue to consolidate the current developed prototypes and build on top of them to invent the commercially acceptable products.

Eurostars? – Celebrities, footballers or EU funding scheme for SMEs?

If you are working with SMEs, you may know that Eurostars is a scheme which assists small businesses to access funding.

eurostarsEurostars supports international innovative projects led by research and development- performing small- and medium-sized enterprises (R&D-performing SMEs). With its bottom-up approach, Eurostars supports the development of rapidly marketable innovative products, processes and services that help improve the daily lives of people around the world. Eurostars has been carefully developed to meet the specific needs of SMEs. It is an ideal first step in international cooperation, enabling small businesses to combine and share expertise and benefit from working beyond national borders.

Eurostars is a joint programme between EUREKA and the European Commission, co-funded from the national budgets of 36 Eurostars Participating States and Partner Countries and by the European Union through Horizon 2020. In the 2014-2020 period it has a total public budget of €1.14 billion.

The role of SMEs for the economy has never been so important. Eurostars aims to bring increased value to the economy, higher growth and more job opportunities.

If you are working with a research-active business or have the opportunity to contact a potential industrial partner undertaking research, this site and the explanatory video found there, might just be the good news they have been waiting to hear!

N.B. As universities are not eligible to be funded through this competition in the UK, such partners must be in a position to self-fund. In addition, to be an eligible project, an SME has to do at least 50% of the work and no one partner or country can do more than 75% of the work. The university input, therefore, is limited and the partnering activity may be approved through benefits in kind, such as reputational, access to SME and relationship building, further joint funding strategy with the company, and academic experience of working with an industrial partner. These factors will need to be considered alongside the 0% fEC return.

 

Thinking of working with a applicant SME? Please contact Emily Cieciura and Jayne Codling in RKEO so that you can access our support and assistance.

UK companies getting the message on innovation

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Growing numbers of UK companies are investing in research into new products and services, according to a study by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. (BIS)
The UK Innovation Survey 2015 Main Report, published by BIS on 12 July, collates the results of telephone interviews and a postal questionnaire completed by nearly 30,000 businesses around the UK.

It characterises innovation as any activity involving the introduction of a new product or process; engagement in on-going innovation projects; changes to the company structure or practices; and investment in research, training or technology.

The proportion of innovators increased across the UK, with the introduction of new computer software and ghardware were the most common forms of innovation investment reported.

Click on the links below for more information:

Useful summary: UK innovation survey 2015: infographic

Background: UK innovation survey 2015

Full report to download: UK innovation survey 2015: main report