August 28, 2020, by Rob Ounsworth
Funding to help you work with small businesses
Funding is available to help our academics to engage and work with small and medium-sized businesses. The Small Business Engagement Award is an internal fund available to all academics and offers up to £4,000 to cover direct costs of academic time and project delivery.
The University has an established SME business network and events programme with more than 1,500 external contacts. The funding could help you to engage the group with a webinar or presentation of your research, deliver a workshop to explore themes in depth, or develop a one-to-one project with a company.
Our business engagement team will help you with everything from starting conversations with companies, to pitching your content at the right level for a business audience. Successful applicants will be supported to develop their business engagement skills, disseminate their research to SMEs and develop meaningful external relationships that can lead to impact and other collaboration opportunities.
The Small Business Engagement Awards were first launched last year and have helped our academics to accelerate their research and have a positive impact on SME businesses.
The evidence I was able to generate from this award
helped me to secure a £100,000 extension grant
Dr Holly Blake
Dr Holly Blake, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science in the School of Health Sciences, received funding last year to help her to engage SMEs in her research project on health checks in the workplace.
She said: “I was delighted to receive this award and the support I have had from the business engagement team has been fantastic. The evidence I was able to generate from this award helped me to secure a £100,000 extension grant for an industry-based research study.
“It also enabled me to get students involved in ‘real-world’ research and gave them the valuable opportunity to engage with smaller organisations as well as large ones.”
Another recipient of funding last year was Dr Zsofia Toth, Assistant Professor in Marketing, from Nottingham University Business School. Zsofia said: “The funding has been really helpful and enabled the creation of impact with SMEs as well as supported progress on an academic study on SME (supplier) attractiveness.”
For more information and to apply, please visit this guidance document and submit your expression of interest.
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