Tagged / productivity

Innovate UK launches £15m manufacturing call

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Innovate UK has opened a £15-million competition to support the development of novel technologies or production processes across the manufacturing industry.

Projects need to focus on identified technical or commercial challenges. Innovate UK will fund projects that aim to lead to increased UK SME productivity, competitiveness and growth.

Projects need to be led by a business and must involve at least one SME. They can be carried out by an SME working alone or in collaboration with other organisations. Projects with costs of £100,000 or more must involve working with other partners

Innovate UK are looking for projects which focus on any of the technical feasibility, industrial research or experimental development research categories.

Projects should last between 6 months and 3 years. They should range from total costs of £50,000 to £2 million.

Competition brief in full.

Competition guidance.

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.

The value of university-business collaborations to the UK economy

 

Technology in the hands

 

As organisations make submissions to the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review 2015, Director for Employment & Skills at CBI, Neil Carberry, outlines the case for investment in universities.

Productivity levels and skills are considered  two of the greatest challenges. This is where universities and their graduates – and their relationship with UK business – come in.

The latest CBI/Pearson Education and Skills Survey, Inspiring Growth, illustrates the magnitude of the skills emergency. Two out of three businesses surveyed expect their need for staff with higher level skills to grow in the years ahead, but more than half of them fear that they will not be able to access enough workers with the required skills. Even more disturbingly, it is the high-growth, high-value, high-potential sectors which are under most pressure – including construction, manufacturing, science, engineering and technology.

UK productivity has for a long time lagged behind most other developed countries. There are a number of causes, including low skills levels in many sectors, but a fundamental driver of productivity growth is innovation, where the UK is held back by low levels of public and private investment and an unbalanced ecosystem in which the infrastructure for supporting commercial innovation does not match the world-class research base.

Click here to read the full blog post.

http://blog.universitiesuk.ac.uk/2015/09/22/the-value-of-university-business-collaborations-to-uk-economy/