Category / innovation

Design Foundations: helping companies with early stage innovation

Funding opportunities, innovation, Knowledge Exchange

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There is a great deal of evidence demonstrating that businesses that use a strong early-stage design process generate increased revenue, market share and exports, as well as having a faster and more cost-effective innovation process.

Early-stage design will give companies  (and investors) greater confidence in your ideas, help to streamline development and reduce the likelihood and cost of rectifying problems later on. Brand equity and business resilience can also be improved through design.

Design Foundations is a great opportunity to develop your organisation’s innovation capability and lay the foundations for compelling, high-value propositions that will help attract investors and customers.

What is it?

Design Foundations is a new £3m grant-funding programme from Innovate UK aimed at helping companies to identify high-value innovation opportunities and generate better propositions for new products, services and business models.

The funding supports companies explore future possibilities in collaboration with a design team; bringing new tools and approaches to the plate. It offers up to 70% funding of projects up to £100,000 for any UK company, irrespective of scale or maturity, operating in any sector. There are three rounds of funding across 2017, opening for applications on January 9.

For more information including how this can help businesses , the application process and what makes a good application can be found using the links below.

More information.

Launch event 17 January 2017 – London.

 

 

Innovate UK – latest funding opportuntity

Business Engagement, Funding opportunities, innovation, Knowledge Exchange

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Innovation in infrastructure systems – round 2

Innovate UK is to invest up to £15 million in projects to stimulate innovation that creates UK business growth in infrastructure systems. We want businesses to collaborate to develop new integrated solutions and new business models.

Innovate UK are  looking to fund a portfolio of projects. These may include technical feasibility, industrial research or experimental development projects.  Projects are likley to to range in size from total eligible costs of £25,000 to £5 million. Projects should last between 3 months and 3 years.

Projects must show significant innovation in one of our priority areas:

  • ‘smart’ infrastructure
  • energy systems
  • connected transport
  • urban living

Proposals must improve business growth, productivity and/or create export opportunities for at least one UK small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) involved in the project. The proposal needs to include at least one SME either working alone or in collaboration with others (business, research base and third sector).

There are 2 competition options:

  • £5 million for projects that last from 3 months to 1 year with costs from £25,000 to £100,000
  • £10 million for projects lasting from 1 year to 3 years with costs between £100,000 and £5 million

Click here for more information.

Click here for all live calls.

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.

Innovate UK launch open funding programme

Business Engagement, Funding opportunities, innovation, Knowledge Exchange

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Are you working with a business that would be interested in this funding opportunity? Research organisations can participate as project collaborators. (The level of total research participation is set at a maximum of 30% of total eligible project costs.)

UK businesses can apply for a share of up to £15 million to deliver transformational innovations with potential for impact on the UK economy.

The competition is now live and open to the best business-led, innovative or disruptive ideas or concepts. These can be drawn from any technology, engineering or industrial area. This area can be one that fits into, or be outside of, any one or more of Innovate UK’s 4 priority sectors for growth. (Emerging and Enabling Technologies, Health and Life Sciences, Infrastructure Systems, Manufacturing and Materials.)

To be in scope, a proposal must:

  • demonstrate transformational or disruptive innovation leading to novel, new products, processes or services
  • articulate a clear, anticipated growth and commercialisation impact for the business(es) with considerable, demonstrable (as you would set out in a pitch to any serious investor) potential to lead to a significant return on investment (ROI)

Priority will be given to proposals that are likely to lead to sustainable gains in productivity and/or access to new overseas markets through export-led business growth.

To lead a project you must:

  • be a UK-based business
  • be a business of any size
  • carry out your project in the UK
  • work alone or in collaboration with others (businesses, research base and third sector) – this could be BU

For more information click here for:

or more information on knowledge exchange at BU contact Jayne Codling within RKEO.

 

Health Innovation Programme – February 2017

Business Engagement, innovation

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This 3 day course is aimed at innovators and entrepreneurs who are looking to start or expand a healthcare related business.

Dates: 9, 10 & 14 February 2017

Location: University of Southamption Science Park

Deadline for applications:  31 January 2017*  – places will be filled on a first come first serve basis

For more information: click here

To apply: click here

Researcher in residence programme

Funding opportunities, innovation

Technology in the hands

Open call

Digital Catapult and the RCUK Digital Economy (DE) Theme is now accepting applications for the Researchers in Residence Programme, to be hosted at the Digital Catapult Centre in London or at one of the local centres (Northern Ireland, Yorkshire, Brighton and North East & Tees Valley).

Projects can either be applied or more strategic in nature:

Applied projects will generally be user-centred and focused on impact generation in the short to medium term. Proposals should be relevant to one or more of the current Digital Catapult technology layers.

Strategic projects will help shape current Digital Catapult projects, and drive the creation of new activities or projects relevant to Digital Catapult’s overall mission. Proposals that highlight potential new directions, new users and novel means of impact generation are encouraged. The focus should be impact generation in the broadest sense. Projects could be undertaken on either a full time basis or via a series of short secondments to Digital Catapult.

Eligibility: Open to those with a contract of employment at a UK university, or PhD students who have submitted their thesis by the closing date, Sunday 8 January 2017.

Timeline: The closing date is 23:59, Sunday 8 January 2017 with decisions due by early March. The programme will run until 2018, with two funding calls each year. The next round will open for applications in summer.

Funding: all residencies will benefit from a grant of up to £25,000 to cover expenses, including travel and accommodation.

Further information

Newsletter and more information about Digtal Catapult

 

 

SHIVA project progresses with innovation funding

Business Engagement, HEIF, innovation, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer

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The SHIVA Project has received Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) that runs for 12 months from August 2016 until July 2017. (HEIF 5+1+1.)

The HEIF funding will be critical in terms of supporting the development of networks locally, nationally and beyond. The key aims will be to link user groups and stakeholders in education, health and wellbeing related to children, young people and adults, through the creative digital innovations offered by the SHIVA project.

This project which brought innovative virtual sculpting tools to children with complex disabilities, enabling them to partake in creative digital activities from which they had previously been excluded was recognised in the Time Higher Awards last November winning the Outstanding Digital Innovation in Teaching or Research Category.

Originally the SHIVA project on 3D modelling and 3D printing for young people with disabilities was funded by the EU Interreg programme with the duration from 2010 to 2015.

The original project team worked with the Victoria Education Centre (VEC) in Poole.  As the project ended in 2015, it was clear there was scope to take this project beyond the initial funding and the SHIVA project has successfully been awarded impact acceleration funding and more recently HEIF funding.

A new Research Assistant, Michelle Wu, an NCCA graduate (2016), is the latest member to join this team. Michelle will be involved in turning the SHIVA system into a deployable product with proper installation, configuration and usage instructions. This area of work will help make SHIVA accessible to all potential users in the UK and further afield and strengthen the potential for developing networks that will benefit from this award winning technology.

For more information on this project contact Alexander Pasko or Oleg Fryazinov within the Faculty of Media and Communication.

Jayne Codling within RKEO co-ordinates the HEIF project portfolio for BU. Feel free to contact Jayne if you have any questions regarding HEIF at BU or knowledge exchange activities including business engagement and innovation funding.

Bournemouth University Researchers Win ‘Innovation Oscar’ for Third Year in a Row

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iet-awardBournemouth University researchers Professor Venky Dubey and Dr Neil Vaughan have won a prestigious Information Technology Award at the IET Innovation Awards for their Orthopaedic Simulator.

Funded by the Wessex Academic Health Science Network, the simulator allows surgeons to practice on a virtual engineering-based hip model, which will improve safety and durability in hip replacements.

With the growing aging population, there are 66,000 hip replacements performed annually in the UK. The simulator helps to improve surgeon’s accuracy and skill, by enabling them to practice, which will reduce the amount of surgeries which dislocate. This number currently stands at 20%.

As well as being a considerable resource for trainee surgeons, the device will also enable current surgeons to improve their accuracy. The simulator will allow NHS surgeons to focus more on their patients, by freeing up consultancy time and reducing training costs.

The IET Innovation awards are considered a ‘Technological Oscar’ in science, engineering and technology.

The judging panel commented, “The simulator was an excellent entry that is receiving international acclaim in the important application of 3D technologies within the global health industry.”

The simulator has been developed by research undertaken in a partnership between Bournemouth University and Royal Bournemouth and Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts.

When asked about the award Professor Dubey commented, “It is marvellous winning another innovation award. This is testimony of our hard work and ingenuity that we put in to our projects. This is the third year in a row that we have won the Innovation Awards,”

“This confirms that BU is second to none when it comes to innovation. We’d like to thank our collaborators and partners who have supported our projects over the years.”

ESRC Festival of Social Sciences

BRIAN, Business Engagement, innovation, Knowledge Transfer

Dr John Oliver, from the Advances in Media Management research cluster, recently delivered a keynote lecture at the Open Innovation Design Jam competition at the University of Glasgow. The event formed part of the ESRC’s Festival of Social Science programme of activities that ran from 5th-12th November across the UK.

The Design Jam also involved a number of short, intensive brainstorming sessions in which teams developed innovative solutions to challenges. This event was an opportunity for innovators and businesses to explore open, collective and user-led innovation.
Dr Oliver’s talk on media innovation strategies presented empirical data on how the innovation practices of UK media firms had transformed firm capabilities and corporate financial performance.

Welcoming Dr Caitlin Potter to the BU Eco-Coding team

Business Engagement, HEIF, innovation, Knowledge Exchange

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We would like to welcome Dr Caitlin Potter who joined our Eco-Coding team from Bangor University on the 31st October. Her previous work has been on microbial communities of peatlands using metagenomic techniques and she will bring expertise and experience to the Eco-coding project.

Now that Caitlin is with us we look forward to the next stage of the project; discovering what our urban pollinators have been feeding on.

Click here for more information on this project and check out our new project page on the BU Research Website.

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UKRO Visit – Slides now available

Funding opportunities, innovation, international, Post-award

UKRO logoRKEO were pleased to welcome UK Research Office’s BU account manager, Maribel Glogowski for our annual subscriber visit, on Tuesday 25th October. Maribel is based in Brussels, along with the rest of the UKRO team, so is BU’s perfect partner for keeping us up to date with funding developments in the EU.

UKRO is the European office of the UK Research Councils. It delivers a subscription-based advisory service for research organisations (in the main UK HEIs) and provides National Contact Point services on behalf of the UK Government. UKRO’s mission is to maximise UK engagement in EU-funded research, innovation and higher education activities. As a BU member of staff, you can sign up to receive email alerts direct to your inbox.

Maribel covered the following topics:

  • Updates on project management including post-referendum statements
  • Creative Europe
  • Erasmus+
  • Accessing the Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges

All the slides from the day are available in the MyBU Community for the Research & Knowledge Exchange Development Framework. Please select the International Pathway to access these slides – more resources are being added over the coming months.  All staff have been pre-enrolled into this community.

If you have any questions about this event or are considering applying to EU funding schemes, please contact Emily Cieciura (RKEO, Research Facilitator: EU & International)

 

Business collaboration & networking

Business Engagement, innovation, Knowledge Exchange

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Need help with networking? – why not book onto the business engagement and networking session on 2 November for some hints and tips that you can put into practice.

Date: Wednesday 16 November

Location: The Fusion Building, Bournemouth University

Event information:

Building on the successful Game Changer event held earlier in the year, Bournemouth University and NHS Dorset Clinical Commissioning Group present The Game Changer Reloaded – promoting innovation and fostering collaboration across Dorset. Join Richard Dolan, Dr Phil Richardson and Professor Jim Roach and a diverse collection of speakers to learn more about the art of the possible and the power of innovation to transform health services within the region.

Places are going fast for both sessions so make sure you book your space. Academics are encouraged to attend both sessions but if you are looking for potential funding partners / research collaborators session 2 is a must.

It’s free: book now for sessions 1 and/or 2

Timings:

Session 1 – 9.00 am -3.00 pm: Speakers from BU and external organisations share their innovation journeys throughout the day providing inspiration and ideas to those attending as to how to get involved.

Session 2 – 3.15 pm  – 4.15 pm: Facilitation and networking: This session offers the opportunity to share ideas and develop future collaborations. There’s also the chance to begin to consider research ideas that could subsequently be progressed in order to obtain external funding in the future.

Each session will need to be booked separately.

Throughout the day there’s a pop-up innovation exhibition for guests to enjoy and to share and refine ideas.

It’s free: book now for The Game Changer Reloaded 

This event forms a number being run at the university as part of the Festival of Enterprise.

Need help with networking? – why not book onto the business engagement and networking session on 2 November.

Innovation awards

Business Engagement, innovation

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SME innovation awards (2016) – small business were honoured on Tuesday evening at  an awards ceremony at the Houses of Parliament.

The awards recognise the many innovative successful projects that Innovate UK has co-funded. They celebrate the projects and companies that show the impact of innovation on business growth and the economy.

There were 5 categories – 4 specific and 1 overall award for inspirational innovation. Could we consider research and collaboration at BU for such an award? KTP’s also form part of this funding and contributed to Mech Tool Engineering Ltd, Gaist Solutions Limited and University of York and Phasefocus being shortlised.

Read the blog post in full including the winners and organisations shortlisted and how their areas of innovation became award winning.

Live funding competitions.

How to apply for funding.

Case studies.

Are you using technology for social good?

Funding opportunities, innovation

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Digital technologies and the internet are providing new opportunities to address social challenges.  This phenomenon is known as digital social innovation (DSI). To explore what DSI is, who is working on it, and how they can be supported, a website has been launched www.digitalsocial.eu in partnership with the Waag Society and SUPSI, with funding from the European Commission DG Connect. The website features stories and case studies of DSI, along with information on funding and events for DSI. It also helps people and projects working on DSI to showcase their work and find new collaborators.

Two years on, DSI has come a long way. New organisations, projects and collaborations are popping up across Europe. Terms like crowdfunding, making, sharing economy and digital democracy are entering the mainstream. The number of incubators, accelerators and investment funds focused on tech for good has grown. Emerging technologies like blockchain and widely accessible 3D-printing have given DSI new potential.

How can you get involved?

  • Sign up: With over 1,000 organisations and 700 projects signed up,  it’s quick and easy to register and is your access point to the world of www.digitalsocial.eu.
  • Submit funding and events: There are two really simple forms which you can fill in  about funding and events. It doesn’t matter if you’re responsible for them, or if you just came across them on Twitter.
  • Talk to each other: The website allows you to see which organisations work with each other and which projects they work on. Please do reach out to organisations you work with and use the site to find new partners who you think might be able to help you. You never know what might result from a serendipitous conversation on  the website.
  • Spread the word: Please tell other digital social innovators about the website and encourage them to sign up. From Meet-ups to conferences and online communities, this  community is huge.
  • Provide  feedback: about the site.

To find out more about the types of projects showcased on this site and the blog post in full  – click here . A great way to start developing collaborations and identfying ways in which your research could influence policy and generate impact in the future.

Try something different

Centre for Excellence in Learning, innovation, Student Engagement

With its vast agile space, glass-fronted seminar rooms and buzzing collaborative zones, BU’s new Fusion Building offers the perfect opportunity to reimagine learning scenarios – both inside the new walls and elsewhere on our campuses.

The Centre for Excellence in Learning (CEL) is supporting staff to ‘try something different’ and inspire our students through innovative learning.

  • There are resources on the Try something different pages of the CEL website, looking specifically at how academics can use the spaces for different learning scenarios.
  • The Try something different video includes advice from BU’s Professor Stephen Heppell, who is a world expert in contemporary learning.
  • A series of i:Innovate workshops will help staff explore different technologies to deliver the curriculum, take new approaches to assessment and feedback, reimagine teaching large groups and much more. View the full list of i:Innovate workshops on the Staff Intranet.

Try something different today – and see where it takes you.

Business Engagement and Networking

Business Engagement, HEIF, innovation, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer

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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.

You will have the opportunity to hear from both internal and external speakers as to how they have developed networks to facilitate collaborations and engage with the university.

The next session: “Business engagement and networking” will be running on Wednesday 2 November from 2.00pm – 4.00pm and bookings are being taken now.

If you want to put your networking skills to the test there are a number of events running during November that involve the chance to meet with external organisations during the Festival of Social Science and Festival of Enterprise.

Please feel free to contact Jayne Codling or Rachel Clarke if you have any questions regarding knowledge exchange at BU. Both Jayne and Rachel are based within RKEO.

This session forms part of the Research and Knowledge Exchange (RKE) Framework.  Please see previous blog posts in the Development Framework for information on the separate pathways. rkeo-rke-working-with-business