Knowledge Transfer and Impact

Knowledge Transfer

Through several of the disciplines within the College there is extensive engagement with industry and the service sector both nationally and internationally. Principal service sectors with which there is widespread engagement include:

• Oil & gas services
• Wider energy-related services
• Healthcare services
• Environmental management services (including planning and transport)

This engagement takes place via:

• Directly sponsored research
• Graduate employment/continuing professional training
• Dissemination of research of direct interest to the service sector as stakeholder groups (e.g. through journals, conferences, seminars, partnership with professional bodies etc)
• Consultancy
• Knowledge transfer partnerships
• Proof of concept
• Contribution to design of teaching programmes
• Contribution to delivery of teaching programmes
• Sponsoring student projects and/or student placements

Innovation through these engagements takes many forms. This includes direct discussion between employees of service sector companies with academics, the joint development of new techniques, services and software, the development of student projects and placements with service company participation, and the design of teaching programmes to include service sector requirements in the curriculum. The College has been involved in a multitude of research projects that are directly sponsored by service sector companies, and to this extent our research can be said to have been steered by the needs of service organisations for innovative ideas.

There are a number of research centres within the College that have direct links with service sector organisations in both the public and private sector, such links acting as channels for the dissemination of new ideas and best practice and facilitating innovation in both the academic realm and service organisations. There is also clear evidence of the teaching curriculum at both undergraduate and postgraduate level being influenced by the skills needs for new graduates entering the service sector, and the innovative development of new teaching programmes directly focussed towards the future employment skills needs of service industries. A large number of our degree programmes at undergraduate level and postgraduate level are professionally accredited, and academics work in close partnership with professional bodies.

The impact of the spread of innovation through the exploitation of new ideas is principally two-fold: innovation that leads to efficiency savings, be they time, manpower and ultimately financial; and innovation that opens up new markets, and hence generates new business, increased sales, and job creation. The former tends to be incremental innovation, the latter a result of more radical innovative breakthroughs. Principally, however, initiatives are being explored to form innovative partnerships between the College and service sector organisations with a view to maximising the potential for exchange of ideas and knowledge to improve the transfer of knowledge and skills between the two.

Examples of innovation within the College of Physical Sciences since 2000 and including current initiatives consist of:

Research directly sponsored by industry or the service sector:

• Deep water reservoir characterisation and hydrocarbon production optimisation (Petroleum Geology)
• Brinker Technology pipeline sealing techniques (Engineering)
• Data Mining (Engineering)
• Satellite Network of Excellence and standardisation of satellite communication protocols (Inmarsat, Engineering)
• Intelligent Agents (BT, Computing Science)
• Social Policy Grid (Computing Science/Geography)
• Advanced Knowledge Technologies (Rolls Royce, Computing Science)
• Natural Language generation applications in healthcare (Computing Science)
• Marine Biodiscovery (Chemistry)
• Systems Biology (Physics)
• Aberdeen beach project (Engineering/Geography)
• Water purification and energy production (Chemistry)

Research centres with direct links to the service sector:

• National Subsea Research Institute (Subsea UK, Industry Technology Facilitator)
• Centre for Transport Research (First Group)
• Aberdeen Institute for Coastal Science & Management (AFF, SOTEAG, St Fergus Forum)
• Scottish Offshore Materials Centre (providing consultancy to offshore service companies)

New teaching programmes specifically designed to meet service sector skills and knowledge requirements in an innovative fashion:

• MSc Energy Futures (Oil & Gas or Renewable)
• MSc e-Technologies (e-Commerce/e-Business)
• MSc Materials (by research –industrially sponsored)
• MSc Oil & Gas Enterprise Management
• MSc Project Management
• MSc Rural Planning & Environmental Management
• MSc Safety Engineering, Reliability and Risk Management
• MSc Subsea Engineering
• MSc Urban Planning & Real Estate
• BEng/MEng Chemical Engineering
• BEng/MEng Petroleum Engineering

Responsibility for the University's Research and Knowledge Transfer Strategy rests with the Vice-Principal for Research and Commercialisation and the University Committee for Research, Commercialisation and Income Generation (CRIGC). Colleges, through the College Directors of Research and the local College Research Committees, are tasked with translating the strategies into operational practice through action plans. Performance is monitored by CRIGC through regular College reports and a set of operational measures and performance indicators. CRIGC also receives regular reports from the Commercialisation and Income-Generation Sub-Committee on performance against targets for commercialisation activities.

The University has created an internal fund, using monies provided by the Scottish Funding Council, for knowledge transfer activities leading to commercialisation, co-funding with industry and other sectors, and other income-generating activities. Part-funding for these awards can also be provided from Scottish Enterprise Grampian.

Commercialisation Awards are administered through the Committee For Income Generation & Commercialisation (CIGS), which considers applications quarterly. CIGS is made up of internal members of staff together with external lay people, including representatives from Court. In 2009-2010, CIGS will meet on 18th September 2009, 24th November 2009, 15th January 2010 and 27th April 2009. Applications to be considered at these meetings need to be received by the following dates respectively: on 11th September, 10th November, 4th January and 13th April respectively).

Information on the Commercialisation Awards are on the Research and Innovation website at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/r&i/links.

Impact

In the Research Excellence Framework significant additional recognition will be given where high quality research has contributed to the economy, society, public policy, culture, the environment, international development or quality of life.

The Funding Councils are currently developing their proposals for how to assess research impact through a pilot exercise which is due to complete in autumn 2010. They are expected to make a full, detailed announcement about the method for assessing impact, and the weighting of this element within the overall assessment, after the pilot exercise has completed.

To help inform the development of the REF, HEFCE commissioned RAND Europe to carry out a review of international approaches to evaluating the impact of research (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rereports/year/2009/capturingresearchimpactsareviewofinternationalpractice/). Their report presents the findings of the review, based on four case study examples.

The review identifies relevant challenges and lessons from international practice and suggests that the work of the Australian RQF Working Group on Impact Assessment might provide a basis for developing an approach to impact in the REF. The report makes a number of other recommendations concerning attribution, burden and the role of research users, which are outlined in the executive summary.

Further information on impact in the REF is available at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/impact/.