No business can boast a workforce that excels at everything, with the expertise, skills and resources to succeed at any project they embark on. It simply isn’t possible, or practical.
Of course, businesses build their workforce around the relevant skills that they need to function, thrive, and grow. But in challenging market conditions, many UK businesses find themselves at a crossroad, with a critical need to take their business into unknown territory in order to survive, or to fully capitalise on emerging opportunities.
With new technologies such as artificial intelligence disrupting industries, the challenges of meeting sustainability targets, or simply shifting consumer trends, more and more businesses will need to learn how to innovate in order to build resilience for the future.
So how can this be done, if doing so often demands a whole new set of skills or resources?The answer is Knowledge Exchange (KE).
What is Knowledge Exchange?
Put simply, Knowledge Exchange is the transfer of expertise, research and innovation between academic institutions and the commercial sector. It is a powerful driving force for innovation, as it can enable cutting-edge research, new insights, products or prototypes to be actioned and implemented in the wider world. Knowledge Exchange plays a crucial role in empowering businesses to take on innovation projects, by offering them access to resources that might otherwise be inaccessible or difficult to leverage.
Knowledge Exchange can take many forms. It might be a research partnership, consultancy project, student-placement programme, technology transfer, or could focus on the commercialisation of university research.
What are the benefits of Knowledge Exchange?
There are a range of benefits that Knowledge Exchanges offer to both businesses and academic organisations. They foster healthy collaboration between the world of industry and academia, allowing new ideas to take hold and new solutions to be tested, while also enhancing the overall value and relevance of research undertaken within universities.
For businesses there are three vital benefits to knowledge exchange:
Drive Innovation
Knowledge Exchange facilitates the transfer of new ideas and research insights from the world of academia into industry, where they can be stress-tested against real-world conditions and incrementally improved. This transfer helps to drive further innovation while also delivering new products, processes, services or technologies into the market.
Increase competitiveness and power growth
Businesses that innovate are able to diversify their offering, build resilience or improve their competitiveness. By taking part in a knowledge Exchange, a business can ensure that it is one of the first to commercialise cutting-edge technology or scientific breakthroughs, offering significant advantages over rivals and providing fuel for growth.
Access emerging skills and expertise
In order to successfully implement a groundbreaking innovation project, a business might need to draw on skills or expertise that are not readily accessible in the labour market. A knowledge exchange enables businesses to access and leverage even the most specialised skillsets.
How does Knowledge Exchange work?
Knowledge exchange can take many different forms and can therefore function in different ways, depending on the nature of the relationship or the innovation project at the heart of the exchange.
From a business perspective, there are two key conditions that will affect how a knowledge exchange might unfold. The first is the nature of your business, or the nature of the innovation that your business wishes to investigate. The second is the Higher Education Institute (HEI) that you partner with for the exchange.
If you already have a plan for developing your innovation and have identified the skills, knowledge or resources that you need, your next step is to identify a HEI to work with that can offer the expertise that you need.
The resulting partnership may also involve an external funding body (such as Innovate UK) and a suitably qualified graduate who will lead the project, as well as your business and the higher education institute (HEI) in question.
Most higher education institutes (HEIs) offer platforms through which partnerships can be explored, and of course each institute possesses its own specialisms when it comes to research and skills. For example, the Centre for Sustainable Innovation offers resources and expertise relating to organisational change, sustainability and digital transformation.
How does Knowledge Exchange drive growth?
Innovation is a vital part of a healthy economy and Knowledge Exchange is one of the main ways that it can be nurtured and accelerated across industries. According to research, knowledge exchange partnerships generated over £2 billion for the UK economy between 2010 and 2020.
These partnerships offer those involved new opportunities – HEIs can progress research and explore new applications, students and academics can gain valuable experience managing a commercial project and businesses can launch innovations into the market helping them seize new opportunities, build resilience, or stay competitive.
By their very nature, these partnerships can change and evolve over time as the project in question develop. In this way, Knowledge Exchange can progress from a simple feasibility experiment to a broader project that seeks to scale-up a prototype or apply research to real-world conditions. Essentially, Knowledge Exchange can play a pivotal role at every step of the innovation journey, whether your business is one that already embraces innovation or completely new to the process. Indeed, it can serve as a powerful tool to help spread innovation to organisations that might not typically have the resources to pursue them in-house, thereby fuelling growth across all sectors and areas of the economy.
Are you interested in a knowledge exchange partnership?
If you would like to get involved in a collaborative partnership with the University of Salford, the Centre for Sustainable Innovation can help facilitate it. You can rely on our expertise to work out the best formats and funding bodies to achieve your goals.
To make an inquiry about collaborating with the CSI on a knowledge exchange partnership please fill in the form below or click here to read more about our collaborative partnerships