Even more cash for knowledge transfer

You have to admire the Research Councils for their persistence when it comes to urging the researchers they support to pay more attention to what happens to all that new science after they have sent off the inevitable research publications. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has just told us that it is putting £55 million over the next three years into grants for 12 Knowledge Transfer Account and 13 Knowledge Transfer Secondments.

The cash involved ranges from £450,000 to £8.3 million. But this isn’t just a case of lobbing money at a bunch of academics and leaving then to get on with it. EPSRC’s announcement says that “An essential element in the success of these grants will be universities and the potential users of research outputs being involved together in setting strategy and targeting resources.”

EPSRC’s web site lives up to is arachnid tag, so you have to follow a lot of threads to land on details of these grants. Do so and you will find that the big one, a staggeringly precise £8,298,190, goes to the Manchester Business School and Professor Rod Coombs, a long time player in research into innovation, who even comes with the job title “Vice President (Innovation And Economic Development)”. The details of the grant tell us that among the things that Manchester gets up to is “joint horizon-scanning which focuses on helping researchers and users to explore technology/problem domains and develop novel strategies to solve them”.

Training, CPD as they put it, lapsing into the jargon that seems to be obligatory in such things, is also a part of the Manchester package. The details of the grant, which runs from 1 October to 30 September 2012, promise “Masterclasses on a given technology domain” that “will enable users to develop strategies to exploit it”.

Another big grant is the £5,749,200 for the University of Sheffield’s Knowledge Transfer Account. This time the Principal Investigator, a title that they use even when there isn’t much in the way of research going on to investigate things, is Professor Tony Ryan, who spent some years advising ICI, the now defunct chemicals, on what went on at the frontiers of chemistry research.

A part of Sheffield’s plan is its Virtual Corporate Laboratory. It describes this as “an exemplar programme to fuel the product pipelines of corporate partners; working on collaborative programmes to convert University R into company focused D”.

There is stuff in Sheffield’s description about the group’s philosophy. For example, they write of their belief that “the point of contact between the academic researcher and the end user is critical to effective knowledge transfer”. You can say that again. It is good to see that some universities appreciate this simple fact of life.