8 November, 2012, by Paul Yeomans
Celebration!
This week at the end of the Jubilee year we celebrated our own 60th; the 60th Knowledge Transfer Partnership the University has been awarded.
The Knowledge Transfer Partnership programme (KTP) is a government funded initiative that aims to transfer knowledge from the UK’s Universities and embed that knowledge in businesses of all sizes to help them become more profitable.
At Nottingham we’ve been doing them for almost ten years and have managed to maintain a 100% success rate of funding applications. So to celebrate this we hosted an event at the Universities Sir Colin Campbell Building and invited back previous company participants, previous academics and a selection of businesses who haven’t yet worked on a KTP but who we thought might be interested to hear from those who have.
We saw two great presentations from Paul Taylor (CEO of Dynex Semiconductors) and Matthew Hague (Product Strategy Director, Microlise Ltd) and both talked about their own experience of the scheme. Both companies have done several KTP projects and are both currently on their third. Over the duration of their projects both businesses have engaged with several Universities across a range of different schemes and spoke at length about the positive benefits this has for the business.
These benefits range from bringing some world leading academics into the business (through KTP) to help solve some real technical challenges that the companies couldn’t do on their own right down to getting students in for work experience and internships that gives the company some fresh ideas and potentially gives them access to good quality graduates they may want to recruit in the future.
Afterwards there were celebratory drinks, and our amazing “I Love KTP” cake of course and a real buzz about the place as the businesses and academics networked and shared ideas. A number of businesses expressed interest in taking forward KTP projects as a result of hearing from our speakers and it was good to meet up from some contacts from old projects and see how the impacts of the projects have developed over time.
Here’s to the next 60 KTP’s!
A very interesting evening – the company talks were excellent, but also good to hear from Dario about the benefits for the academics involved.