BCE

JISC infoNet are pleased to announce the launch of a new infoKit – ‘Knowledge Transfer 2.0’, or ‘KT2.0’.

‘’Knowledge Transfer, and specifically the transfer of innovation and intellectual property from colleges and universities to businesses and other communities, is a changed game. In many significant ways the context has changed, the skills and tools required have changed, and innovation practice has changed…..but nobody has bothered to update the manual: to set out the new rules of the game!’’ (Brian McCaul, originator of the approach and author of the new infoKit)

This resource integrates current innovation theory, modern social media tools and current thinking on market behaviour or motivation, to provide a more effective model of Knowledge Transfer; a model that is capable of delivering more with less.

This rich and practical resource demonstrates the benefits of a more progressive and less proprietorial approach to knowledge transfer, and makes a strong case for a new, open, technology-enabled approach which has potentially wide applicability across the sector. Woven throughout the resource are a number of sound key principles which reflect leading thinking in the area and which will resonate widely in the current climate of austerity and public accountability.

For more background and context about the resource see http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/kt/about

View the new infoKit at http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/kt

Dr Allyson Reed, Director of Strategy and Communications at the Technology Strategy Board has recently written an article highlighting the TSB’s five-year strategy for 2011-2015 and sharing her views on how businesses can stimulate growth, including through collaboration with universities and open innovation. Technology Strategy Board is focused on how real and tangible business benefits can be delivered from innovation through collaboration.

One of the ways that open innovation is encouraged is through Innovation Platforms, where many players are brought together to address a key societal challenge
Dr Allyson Reed

Read the full article here

The CPD for BCE framework project aims to develop a Continuing Professional Development framework for Business and Community Engagement (BCE) organisations and practitioners.

The project is led by AURIL and JISC in collaboration with a working group made up of representatives across the breadth of Business and Community Engagement.
We have now prepared a first draft of the framework and this is available at http://www.slideshare.net/jisc_bce/cpd-for-bce-framework-survey-dec-2012

To arrive at this, we have had to deconstruct to reconstruct. The new framework is based on evidence and information gathered from a national survey conducted in May and June 2011, alongside six focus events held across the UK at the same time. From the results of these, the Working Group has developed a framework that tries to take account of the wide range of BCE roles and activities and the knowledge and skills required. The Working Group looked at best practice in similar and other sectors and received expert advice.

We have identified that BCE roles and activities are comprised of three key elements: relationships, communications and activities that are combined with a set of personal qualities (the inner triangle). We also concluded that BCE activities are undertaken for 3 benefits or areas: economic, social and internal (the outer triangles), each with different aims and drivers, activities and processes. These are not ‘slots’ or ‘pigeon-holes’. A BCE practitioner or organisation could be operating in two or more areas simultaneously.

We have then identified the activities and process involved and the knowledge and skills required to do them. Some of these are common across BCE, others are specialised for a particular area or benefit.

When the framework is finalised and goes on line, you will be able to move your mouse across any part of the framework, click on each triangle to ‘drill down’ to activities and processes, and knowledge skills and see more detailed information about these. This will be part of the development of the on line tool, the next phase of the project.

At this initial stage, the framework does not include levels or detailed breakdown of processes. We intend that these will form part of the next version of the framework.
We are consulting with a wide range of stakeholders and potential users of the framework and would appreciate your feedback on the draft framework.
After you have studied the framework slides the survey will take you around 5 minutes to complete (3 pages) and will remain open until Thursday 12 January 2012

SURVEY LINK: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WFNHFY6

The prestigious Royal Society in London was the venue for this year’s New Engineering Foundation Innovisions award ceremony and conference. This was an opportunity for the FE sector to showcase its involvement and knowledge transfer activities across the country’s business community. There were key note speeches from major players in the business community highlighting and challenging the attendees to look for innovative solutions to drive the economy out of the current recessional tendencies.

The opening keynote introduced the Intelligent College which aims to identify an intelligent way of teaching and learning. At the heart of the Intelligent College is the ‘golden thread’ of innovation, the capacity to:

• understand the needs of the future
• translate that into culture, planning, curriculum, teaching and learning
• generate the market for new qualifications and skills
• devise partnerships with employers and other civic leaders to promote this new way of working

Throughout the day Derek Gribble form South Devon College was able to demonstrate the eInnovate business innovation portal which has been developed on the Moodle virtual learning environment (VLE) platform. He was also able to demonstrate the iPad/iPhone app which along with the portal has also been developed through the JISC BCE funded project. There was a great deal of interest from colleges who attended the conference, with many of the colleges themselves looking to develop a similar portal for attracting businesses to their knowledge transfer/exchange capabilities. With the contacts made it is hoped to build upon experiences to share and develop innovative approaches to reaching business communities and networks to promote the services offered by colleges.

Both the portal and the iPad app can be accessed through the following URL http://tinyurl.com/6km694n

Do you have skills and expertise in impact analysis…
…or, are you a researcher looking for support embedding impact analysis in research?

Grant Funding Call now available…….

JISC is funding an opportunity for researcher groups to develop their capability to analyse and articulate the impact and benefits of their work, by working in partnership with FE and HE staff who have expertise in impact analysis. The objective is to stimulate the cross-pollination of existing expertise and technology to enhance capacity in the impact analysis of research across the sector.

Funding of up to £30,000 per project is available to support three-way collaborative partnerships comprising:

• Research groups seeking to develop their capabilities in analysing and articulating the impact and benefits of their research;
• Business and Community Engagement (BCE) practitioners with expertise in identifying external impact and benefits, and designing institutional services for this purpose;
• Leading research information management expertise and resources for impact evidence.

The full text of the call together with eligibility criteria is available here.

The deadline for proposals is 1 March 2012.

Funded projects will run from May to October 2012.

An online matching site has been launched by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement to support the formation of these partnerships. Interested researchers, impact analysts and research information management experts can sign here: http://nccpe1.ning.com and find out more.

The Association of Colleges (AOC) annual conference is always an interesting event, combining speakers from the sector, government ministers and celebrities in a varied programme. This year was no exception and with the expert chairing of Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark, we were led through a variety of topical issues. These ranged from reducing regulation/bureaucracy and competition for HE places, through the role of colleges in the community and a debate on whether Britain’s society is crumbling, to a lesson in economics from BBC’s Paul Mason and some interesting ‘futurological fallacies’ from trendspotter Magnus Lindkvist.

The role of colleges in providing HE courses stimulated some interesting comments about relationships with franchising universities, and a message from Vince Cable that he would not tolerate anti-competitive behaviour. However, the balance between collaboration and competition is clearly being tested across both FE and HE, with potential implications for attitudes towards open innovation and resources, partnerships and the move to a more diverse delivery model.

An interesting topic that has been gaining momentum over the last couple of years at AOC is entrepreneurship. This year saw a number of plenary and parallel sessions, describing initiatives where colleges were both embedding entrepreneurial skills within the curriculum and also setting up organisational processes to support student enterprises, both economic and social. Perhaps most striking though was the increasing recognition of links between Local Enterprise Partnerships’ needs to address unemployment and local regeneration and the role of the college in providing not just an appropriately skilled workforce but also stimulating business formation and social services.

Some presentations from the parallel sessions are available on the AOC’s website.

In association with JISC, the Higher Education Academy are pleased to invite the submission of abstracts for case studies on a range of topics pertaining to Open Educational Resources including public engagement. Funding has been provided by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to offer grants of £2,000 for the production of evidence-informed studies on the theme of pedagogical development from OER practice.

In these case studies, individuals or teams from higher education in England are invited to share their experiences of OER practice, situate these within the wider context of OER and offer a model of best practice for the higher education sector.

The OER case study series aims to create high quality, publishable, open material to support, inform and guide the HE sector in the creation, use and re-use of Open Educational Resources under the following topics:

• OER and student as producer
• OER and student satisfaction
• OER and staff development
• OER and teaching quality
• OER and distance learning
• OER and public engagement
• Changing the OER culture of your institution
• Barriers to OER

To be considered for funding to contribute to this series, please complete an OER case studies proposal form and send it as an e-mail attachment to: sarah.cutforth@heacademy.ac.uk by 9 December 2011.

OER case studies call for abstracts (DOC, 107kb)
OER case studies proposal form (DOC, 131kb)

If you would like to discuss your study before submitting a proposal, please contact: sarah.cutforth@heacademy.ac.uk.

The recently completed JISC BCE access to resources project OPEN Biz held a very successful transferability workshop in London last week. The event was attended by over 30 delegates from across the UK and Ireland.

OPEN Biz involved the pilot of an online programme to support Scottish Universities’ engagement with the wider community – namely businesses, social enterprises, charities and business advisors. Led by the University of Edinburgh and Interface – The knowledge connection for business, the pilot project focussed on the West of Scotland, working with key University partners such as the University of Strathclyde, University of the West of Scotland, Glasgow Caledonian University and University of Glasgow.

Hosted in conjunction with the Institute of Knowledge Transfer it offered delegates an opportunity to learn about the institute’s activities. Marc Dobson from the JISC Advance BCE Team also provided an overview of current and future projects, together with resources produced by the programme.

Brian McCaul from Knowledge Transfer 2.0 and critical friend to the project discussed the challenges facing external engagement and the trends in innovation towards openness, co-creation and leanness. Attendees also discussed issues they and their institutions faced when engaging with businesses.

Dr Siobhan Jordan, Director of Interface Scotland presented the OPEN Biz project activities together with a number of case studies demonstrating how the project has enhanced their engagement with businesses in Scotland.

The project is planning to continue to explore options on how the take forward the best practice outlined at the workshop via the Institute of Knowledge Transfer, JISC, Interface and Technology Strategy Board and indeed explore other models of engaging with SMEs from across the UK.

Slides from the event are available here

The first phase of Open Innovation and Access to Resources projects within the JISC BCE Programme have recently completed. As part of the process, projects were each allocated a critical friend to support their delivery and provide practical advice and guidance to ensure their projects were a success.

George Munro took on the role as Critical Friend to the Engage project, led by Queens University Belfast in partnership with Belfast Metropolitan College. During his engagement with the project George wrote an article to share his experiences and thoughts on BCE and the project’s direction.

You can read the article here

Three projects from JISC’s BCE Programme showcased their work at this year’s AURIL Conference.

BCE Programme Manager Simon Whittemore called the session a taster – a mezze – of some of the work JISC is doing to support institutions to improve their online presence and maximise their online impact with external partners.

“It was really just a taster, but I suppose the unifying theme was online presentation – the use of web technology, how to access your audiences through these channels, how to better access audiences that we still have challenges accessing, like SMEs, through these channels and engage them, get them on board and then we can start to shape solutions to them.”

The showcased projects included OpenBiz – one of the Open Innovation and Access to Resources (OIA2R ) project aiming for better engagement with SMEs – a promotion of a new project exploring how to maximise research expertise online and a new BCE Research Impact project led by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE).

A second round of funding proposals for the OIA2R are currently being taken in and Simon is hoping to see bids that show good innovative and sustainable partnerships.

“I would like to see bids where an institution has taken a really strong leading role in the local partnership”, he said.

“In Open Innovation I’d like to see some really exciting online engagement in co-development of ideas. There’s a huge potential there but it does always still need a translation process between the research idea and the application.”

A call for new Research Impact projects is also open.