The Creating Knowledge update from the June 2017 Leadership Bulletin

Creating knowledge – Professor Paul Harrison

We have made a public commitment in our new strategy document to develop our Health Innovation Campus at the Olympic Legacy Park. This will be a complex challenge, but the reward will be a long-term nucleus to grow our research and its impact across the broad range of disciplines that can come under the umbrella of ‘research, innovation, knowledge transfer and commercialisation in healthcare, health technologies, sports, exercise science, food, nutrition and wellbeing’.

An internal audit of our people, projects, partnerships and assets under this umbrella, led by Christina King and Steve Haake, had 77 submissions of activity from across all of the University’s four faculties. This demonstrates the necessary critical mass we need to compete for large-scale funding opportunities: being able to draw upon the expertise and support of a research network of over 100 people is a very powerful argument that can be used with funders to instil confidence. It also illustrates the inclusiveness of this, our first, pan-University multi-disciplinary theme. So it is right that the Creating Knowledge Board is giving a high priority to targeted investment in this area.

We began the visioning work to understand `what we mean by health innovation’, `what activities and people we expect to be there’ and `what impact we are trying to make’. The outcomes of these discussions will be circulated in due course, but we see opportunities for student engagement, placements, and internships, incubator space for graduate start-ups and grow-on space for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

We also gave a high priority rating to funding academic leadership to bring together other disparate research activity from across our campuses into multi-disciplinary research themes, to create that critical mass which will project our expertise to the world-class levels necessary to compete in the future funding climate.