Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

Anca Paraschiv

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) link forward - thinking businesses with the UK’s world class universities to deliver innovation projects led by inspired graduates.

KTPs can help business growth and transformation by embedding a new capability into an organisation, by helping solve a challenge the business is facing, and by offering access to academic expertise and resources that a business may not have in-house –leading to the potential for the delivery of business-led innovation projects.

These unique collaborative partnerships are partfunded by a grant (60% Innovate UK & 40% business contribution). A typical KTP project delivers a package of support valued at around £80,000 – £100,000 per year, with each application led by a knowledge base, working with a business and completed jointly.

On average three new research projects and two research papers are created for each KTP project and, equally, KTPs are a source of valuable research income, aid in identifying new research themes and have the potential to contribute to the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

The Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme is also one of the UK’s largest graduate recruitment programmes, with over 300 job opportunities each year for graduates (known as ‘associates’) to lead KTP projects. For these graduates the successful completion of a KTP project often leads to a permanent job, and every known Associate is given a dedicated training and development budget.

The current KTP programme at the University is intended to revive the institution’s prior history of engaging with these partnerships which had in the past led to a series of projects developed with local business partners. Following the expansion of the team within the University’s Research and Enterprise Directorate to include a Knowledge Transfer Partnership Manager and an Innovation and Knowledge Exchange Manager is now witnessing an increased external engagement within the local community, both with local businesses and institutions increasing our research and enterprise impact, reputation and involvement within Buckinghamshire and the surrounding regions. BNU is also now represented to various local Chambers of Commerce and engages with the Buckinghamshire Unitary Authority through a range of partnerships and projects designed to ensure that we actively utilise our academic expertise to engage and participate in ways that benefit our external partners.

The Knowledge Transfer Partnership Manager role was created 20 months ago at BNU with the aim to build an increased research and enterprise portfolio, engage with the business community and create a bridge between internal academics’ skills and business needs. Since then the University has been successful in two Knowledge Transfer Partnership and a capacity building application this year having secured a total of £375k funding from Innovate UK.

Following the successful implementation of this strategy, BNU plans to have each of its 7 schools engaged in minimum 1 KTP project per annum as long term goal.