Greater access to R&D opportunities for Small Businesses
The Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) programme is designed to help early stage, high-technology Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) gain greater access to Research and Development (R&D) opportunities supporting the future procurement needs of Government Departments.
More UK universities should be profiting from ideas
Paul Wellings, Vice Chancellor of Lancaster University, issues a warning to universities which fail to make the most of their commercial opportunities. Read the full story on the Guardian website.
Delegates brave the weather for BCE workshop
Not even the biggest snowfall for almost two decades could prevent dozens of delegates from travelling to Oxford for the third and final workshop in the BCE series on 4 February 2009.
This day brought together the issues about BCE that had been raised by institutions and partners, and allowed attendees to discuss those ideas and put forward their own suggestions – particularly on how JISC could take account of BCE needs when devising their long-term strategy.
After a welcome from BCE Programme Manager Simon Whittemore, Rob Allen of JISC introduced the group to ten problems that had been brought up in the previous sessions - access to resources, agility and responsiveness, applying benefits of BCE to other institutional areas, BCE-ICT community of practice, customer relationship management, collaborative service provision, data management, developing BCE capability and capacity, marketing, and metrics. These issues – and more that hadn’t already been mentioned, such as the role of the broker, communication, managing cultural shifts, incentives to engagement, course validation, strategic leadership and business modelling – were fiercely debated.
The group spent the afternoon talking about the ways in which JISC could strategically assist institutions and partners in particular scenarios – accessing resources, institutional agility, managing data and marketing of services. All the ideas have been noted and will feed into future JISC strategy development, and though this was the last of the planned BCE workshop series, further input from all involved in the BCE initiative - in FE, HE, business or the public sector – will be welcomed.
What is innovation?
“Innovation depends not on certainty of being right, but on rapid learning and rapid response to what has been learned.”
Pinchot 1999