Introducing our University-Partnered R&D Pathway

There is a school of thought that the three Ps of successful innovation are philosophy, people and process. What if these three Ps can be properly enabled or even reimagined through the infusion of academic research, student talent and university facilities, respectively?

Well, this is the vision we’re working towards here at Future Space, UWE Bristol's award-winning innovation centre for high-tech businesses. Welcome to the first issue of our new newsletter, a think piece on the nature of university-partnered innovation. I'll be using this platform to share insights and reflections about the trends and opportunities for university-partnered innovation happening across the sector, as well as case studies of such innovations from within Future Space itself.

Reimagining the three Ps of innovation

Across the UK university landscape, nurturing highly skilled and employable graduates alongside the creation of impactful research with business have become key priorities. At UWE Bristol, the University Enterprise Zone is well on its way to becoming the heart of Frenchay campus. And as such, university-partnered innovation – as in, fully realised, well-designed university-partnered innovation that recognises the best of academia and industry and fuses them into one – is not just a driving mission, but a vision we can all benefit from.

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We know that university-partnered innovation ‘helps to generate the knowledge and ideas that unleash innovation, and helps to make businesses greener, healthier and wealthier’ (so says the National Centre for Universities and Business). This vision has become increasingly clear at government level, enabling as it does the development of truly ground-breaking innovations while helping to deliver the future talent that employers need. For us at Future Space, university-partnered innovation is about opening doors and forging opportunities to nurture the growth and success of our businesses – and being co-located on the University of the West of England’s enterprising Frenchay campus means that there's no reason why we cannot lead the way.

So, as we chart Future Space’s next phase of growth, we must remember that collaboration across the borders of industry and academia is key to our innovation story and is central to what Future Space is for. The centre can be best understood as a vortex between the university and the tech ecosystem – a space where research, students and facilities pour in one side and business steps in the other, colliding in the middle to form a genuinely distinctive and dynamic innovation model. Central to this will be the development of our brand-new university-partnered R&D pathway, designed to spark fresh ideas and growth.

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Our University-Partnered R&D Pathway

Ideas and product development is said to consume around 20% of effort in a small business, creating huge barriers to benefitting from R&D. As is well known to many, R&D is about gathering knowledge to create new products or discover new ways to improve an existing product or service. What might be less well known is that while larger companies may have their own R&D team that will test and refine products or processes before commercial use, many smaller companies outsource this work to universities due to a lack of in-house capacity and to access the expertise and advanced research equipment they?possess. We know that there is a strong link between academic research and business-led R&D that can result in a whole host of growth outputs and economic outcomes, namely:

• Enhancing the innovative capabilities and competitiveness of local companies through technology transfer, knowledge exchange, spill-over effects, and new skills.
• Attracting, directly or indirectly, a larger number of higher-GVA jobs, local investment in facilities, technologies and capabilities, R&D-intensive firms, and so on.
• Triggering of agglomeration effects, including attracting specialist investment in new industry clusters as well as a rise in sector-specific entrepreneurship.

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Strong alignment between university-based R&D and the local innovation ecosystem helps to maximise this impact.?And for us at Future Space, R&D becomes a way of connecting our growing companies with UWE Bristol’s outstanding facilities, graduates and academics, ultimately supporting and facilitating the kind of ideas exploration, product development and innovation scaling that can help to position a growing business at the forefront of its industry.?We want all our companies to be trailblazers, and so broadening our business support offering to also include university-partnered R&D is about advocating a level of ambition for our businesses that is co-facilitated through the opportunities of the university, its facilities, its researchers and its graduates.

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For all Future Space businesses, this will equate to a new pathway of R&D offerings, journeying from ideas exploration to product development and more:

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Ideas Exploration:

• Working with either the School of Applied Sciences or the Engineering School, our businesses can devise a piece of exploratory R&D to be conducted by a student, which we'll fund as an internship this year. More than that, the business can choose to co-supervise the research alongside an Academic Advisor, helping to build valuable academic connections.

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Product Development:

• Use of selected on-campus facilities for businesses looking to prototype an MVP or improve an existing product, making use of the Centre for Print Research’s prototyping equipment, which ranges from 3D printing and laser cutting to CNC and beyond.
• Advanced trial and testing can then be undertaken by a postgraduate researcher, aimed at those businesses keen to properly evaluate next steps for their R&D.

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Innovation Scaling:

• And for those businesses keen to take their R&D to the next level, we also offer bid development support from the Research, Business & Innovation Team at UWE Bristol. This team can work with our companies to develop grant applications for, say, a Knowledge Transfer Partnership in collaboration with academics and graduates.

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By supporting our companies with their R&D – specifically in partnership with the infinite possibilities available via UWE Bristol – we believe a business can truly stand at the forefront of their industry.?We’ll be introducing this R&D offering to our resident businesses over the coming weeks and months, and we can’t wait to see what trailblazing innovations come next….

https://www.futurespacebristol.co.uk/