Information for staff enterprise
The Business Development Team (part of Innovation & Enterprise) are here to support, inspire and help you, your school or service and the University make the most of your research, expertise, knowledge and ideas beyond the academic arena. We are currently working on an .
There are many ways in which your research, expertise, knowledge and ideas can impact on the economy, society and the community – indeed this is being assessed in the upcoming REF. One way of exploring these is to consider them under two broad categories - Working with Industry & Organisations and Creating New Business Opportunities.
Working with Industry & Organisations
Working with non-academic partners can be a very different experience to academic collaborations. The majority of opportunities will have closely defined project specifications with tighter timelines and milestone outputs to be achieved. Below are just some examples of how we can work with industry and organisations:
- Student Competitions, Projects & Placements
- Training, Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and Work Based Learning (WBL)
- Access to Facilities and Equipment
- Consultancy & Testing
- Contract Research
- Collaborative / Joint Research
- (KTP)
- Strategic Partnerships
Creating New Businesses & Opportunities
There are various ways of commercialising the intellectual property (“IP”) created by the University (link to Intellectual Property page), these include
- Joint Ventures (JV)
- Spin Out Companies (SO)
- Sale and Licensing
Which route is ‘best’ will vary with each opportunity. The nature of much of our research i.e. Applied and User-Inspired, means a commercial partner is part of many research project teams – in such instances they will be the most natural partner with whom to commercialise and exploit the IP either by JV or licence.
Social Enterprises
Social enterprises (SE) are businesses that trade for a social and/or environmental purpose. A social enterprise will have a clear sense of its ‘social mission’: which means it will know what difference it is trying to make, who it aims to help, and how it plans to do it. It will usually bring in most or all of its income through selling goods or services. And it will also have clear rules about what it does with its profits, reinvesting these to further the organisation’s ‘social mission’.
The University has specific interests in the development of social enterprises in health and social care sectors.
If you have an idea, would like to get involved or simply want to know more, then please get in touch with us or your school/service business development representatives.
