The Creating Knowledge update from the July 2017 Leadership Bulletin
Creating Knowledge – Paul Harrison
In my last two articles in this Bulletin I’ve talked about how we `transform lives’ of individuals and society through our research and the impact it makes as we transfer that knowledge to business, industry, the public sector and government. I’ve talked about the greater prominence of this work in our new strategy as it’s what makes us a university. For our applied mission, that translation of our efforts is as important as our creativity in the first place.
We are now able to make a step-change after raising £25m of external investment over the last 2-3 years to build two new research centres for Advanced Wellbeing and Food Engineering that will form the nucleus of our new Health Innovation Campus (HIC). We are due to break ground this autumn on the first of these and expect to have around 60 researchers working at the Olympic Legacy Park as both centres open in early 2019.
The HIC will be a centre of research and knowledge transfer and will attract third parties to site their facilities in close proximity in order to feed off the intellectual capital being created by us. Our vision is that, in time the HIC will be a beehive of inter-disciplinary innovation that springs from the co-location of university, start-ups, high growth companies, and eventually R&D wings of established large enterprises.
The road ahead will not be straightforward, we are setting ourselves a great challenge but the rewards will make it worthwhile: we envisage a strong mix of private sector funding, inward investment and university-business collaborative projects with opportunities for student internships, industrial secondments for staff, spin-in of expertise from the private sector, graduate enterprises and graduate employment opportunities. The HIC will be our first contribution to the wider Advanced Manufacturing Innovation District; our aim is for it to be grounded in the community and attract inward investment and hence support economic growth for the region.
This helps define what success will look like for us: an applied university that focuses on providing practical solutions to real-world problems. More of our activity will be from contract research and consultancy; commercialisation through start-ups, spin outs and International Property (IP) licensing. We will derive greater income from enterprise activity which will generate additional resources to support our core mission. Academics will be delivering research-informed curricula and will be active as scholars, researchers, practitioners or involved in enterprise: this will create the scholarly atmosphere to inspire our staff and students to fulfil their own goals.
