Social innovation is about new ideas that work to meet pressing unmet needs. The social enterprise sector invests a great deal of time and money to create social innovations, but pays scant attention to maximising its investment in these assets (including IP), which takes a distinct, sophisticated skill set (Young Foundation, 2011).

To this end, K&G Partnership, a strategic partnership between four universities, UWE (lead), York, Sheffield, and Solent & SEMCo will link with 400 innovative Health/Social Care/Energy sector social enterprises to capitalise on KE/KT from the university’s research base. Focused on maximising investments and business growth K&G will connect 400 social enterprises with 60 practitioners & 10 strategic partners via a sustainable innovative online community allowing intellectual property (practitioners) & input (from university research outputs in business strategy, innovation and growth) to be shared and thereby embed KE & KT best practice. K&G clients will each be given ‘Innovation Team’ (comprising business academic; an IP, accounting, legal experts (strategic partners)) to coach them to: identify, utilize and commercialise existing intellectual property assets; develop collaborations with other social enterprises through a series of practical workshops (K&G Regional events); & to manage & organise intellectual property assets through participation in K&G Workshops.

Technology valuation is a specialist, expensive process. As a result, higher education institutions generally only seek to place a value on intellectual assets once they are close to commercialisation, by which time significant resource and expense has already been committed.

Swansea University wishes to build on recent developments in indicative valuation techniques and create a model that can be used to aid strategic decision-making throughout the research lifestyle. In particular, it wishes to model how value is created during the earlier stages of R&D by identifying and examining all the intellectual assets involved. This understanding can be used to refine its investment and IP protection strategies and develop more effective ways of prioritising and communicating the tech transfer pipeline.

Existing IP valuation methods are generally business or product based and tend to understate value when applied to technologies that are at some distance form market. This can lead to under-investment. The university will engage internal resources to examine the stages that reduce risk and enhance value in research activity, using examples from Swansea and other HEIs. It will work with external specialists to calibrate a model which translates these activities into an indication of potential worth.

Swansea University will produce IP forecast as a model, initially in prototype form, and test it across technology sectors to gauge its effectiveness in measuring and predicting a range of potential value outcomes. This will then be coded and made available to other institutions as a web based software tool.

Knowledge exchange between university and business is a complicated process. Innovation Management Capability (arising from absorptive capacity theory) is a key determinant of whether knowledge transfer will be successful.

This project will establish an important link between the IMC score of a firm and the most suitable channel (or mechanism) for knowledge transfer. This will be used to create more enduring knowledge transfer activities and is unique. This has been developed from recent research and over twelve months will: derive an IP and commercialisation- focussed Innovation Fitness Assessment; create a comparative ranking of Knowledge Transfer channels that are linked to a company’s Innovation Fitness profile and create a balanced scorecard to review relative Innovation Management Capability and knowledge transfer performance.

To ensure uptake and sustainability this project is submitted jointly with the University’s research and knowledge transfer service and will be embedded, particularly across IP assessment, new Spin-out creation, open innovation and easy-IP activities, before widening to key partners and research centres of excellence in the Southwest.

Bloodhound SSC is a world land speed record project, which will create novel technologies and processes to achieve its goal of 1,000mph. We have designed the “Bloodhound Open Access User Community Model” (BOAUCM), where IP generated from the innovative design/engineering will, via HEIs and open –source methods, be made available to UK manufacturing, principally SMEs, to improve the manufacturing competitiveness of UK industry. The value of making the IP open – source (free to access) is that both education and industry can develop and adopt new technologies and processes that have been de-risked, and can use the Bloodhound vehicle as a reference to improve adoption and exploitation.

BOAUCM has been promoted by the University of the West of England and an open-access data repository to capture manufacturing and design knowledge and expertise for KE. This proposal seeks to accelerate the process of KE through key stages, including developing the Bloodhound community to critical mass, KE and dissemination practices and creating ten SME demonstration projects. Output of the project include engagement with over 100 UK universities, dissemination to over 1,000 SMEs and a proven model that can demonstrate sustainability and contribution to UK manufacturing competitiveness.

In this project originators of new IP will be invited to submit their ideas to an on-line "crowd assessment" process in which the ideas will be assessed, rated and receive comments and recommendations. A central feature of this crowd assessment and review will be to encourage originators to put forward early stage ideas as well as those typically more developed ones. The "crowd" will consist of a managed group of people invited from universities, relevant business sectors and selected communities. The primary sector focus will be the regional creative and digital industries with whom Sheffield Hallam University has strong strategic links. The communities engaged in assessment and the assessment criteria can be specific to individual proposals, thus allowing the acquisition of evidence supporting subsequent phases of exploitation. This evidence will not only assist a TTO in deciding how to proceed but also can engage potential partners in collaboration much earlier than would normally be the case. It is expected that this innovative model will: encourage more originators to put forward new IP; facilitate early engagement of businesses in the development of university IP; enhance the value of that IP; and be suitable for use by other HEI/PSRE organisations.

Three leading south coast HEIs will fuse best practice, knowledge exchange and business services to create an innovative strategic partnership that will significantly develop the impact of IP in the region. Maximising highly successful yet distinctive approaches, this partnership will open the knowledge base of the institutions to SMEs in the region, offering not only education and insight into mechanisms that HEIs have developed to exploit IP, but also improving the process by which companies can work with HEIs in order to enhance and exploit their own IP.

Using the funding to target Board members of SMEs as ‘agents-for-change’, it will provide training, advice and supported peer-to-peer learning; facilitating knowledge exchange. Building on the concept of Open Innovation it will also lead to exploitation of IP within the HEIs, by transferring it to the SME sector where it is most easily exploited for commercial gain, and greater regional economic benefit.

The project will focus on three sectors; Digital Technologies, Marine and Advanced Manufacturing; selected as significant commercial clusters within the region with a critical mass of expertise within the knowledge base. Crucially public-sector funding is available now to support the ongoing exploitation of IP for these sectors.

Technology transfer offices (TTOs) sometimes struggle to support staff and students who want to spin out social enterprises. This twelve month project will bring together social entrepreneurs and TTO staff to develop an online toolkit that can provide vital support throughout the HE sector. The toolkit will include examples of social enterprise business models and good practice, case studies and model policies, procedures and/or agreements to help TTOs working with social entrepreneurs. A programme of engagement and dissemination will ensure that the results of the work are widely shared and used.

The project will generate cost savings from better use of TTO and other university resources relating to the appropriate exploitation of IP and will promote utilisation of IP that could otherwise remain unexploited by HEIs. The project will be led by University College London and delivered in partnership with University of Manchester and UnLtd, the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs. The project team will be rooted both in the technology transfer and social enterprise sectors with access to networks, conferences, press and other means of engaging stakeholders in the work and disseminating the results.

Our proposal is to develop a web-based tool that will accelerate and increase knowledge transfer interactions between the NHS and industry. Expert clinical opinion is vital in the development of new medical technology by companies to ensure unmet clinical needs are filled as effectively as possible and new products are ‘fit for purpose’ within the NHS. For many small to medium sized companies within the medtech sector, it can be difficult to identify clinical and research staff that have both the time and desire to engage with them at an early stage of new product development. Additionally, companies from outside the life sciences sector looking to find new healthcare applications for their intellectual property would require expert clinical input right from the beginning.

A system of readily identifying and contacting NHS experts by their clinical and research interests is currently in development in partnership with Health Enterprise East (HEE) to cover clinical specialists in Cambridgeshire only. Our proposal will fund the further development of the web-based tool to cover other major NHS Trusts in the East of England ensuring that all clinical specialities are covered, and promote this novel knowledge transfer service to companies in the UK.

This project aims to share best practice from a novel, successful model of IP spin-out created at STFC (a research council). Currently TTO’s generally commercialise a science base that is wider than the background of the staff, which can be overcome by using ‘Gems’.

'Gems' are entrepreneurial individuals with extensive relevant industrial experience. The Gem’s program embeds these individuals into the technology transfer program (complete alignment of objectives by return success sharing). They shape the emerging commercialisation opportunities. In contrast to the existing ‘technology push’ model, where academic institutions promote technologies to target industrial sectors, the GEMs program engages sector specialists early in the evaluation process, thereby ensuring that those selected provide genuine commercial opportunities.

A pilot engagement created a company which raised over £2million in private sector investment within eighteen months. STFC now seeks funding to introduce the program to two university partners and one industry network (ESP KTN), collaborating with an STFC-founded company (UK Innovation Forum Ltd) to put processes in place to create a self-sustaining program in these institutions and then rollout further over the year.

The twelve month Dare Repository project will provide a radical step forward in the University's technology transfer activities, by unlocking access to a wealth of largely unknown and undistributed computer-games related content and software generated over the course of the last eleven years of the Dare to be Digital Competition.

In a phased approach which enlists the assistance of a panel of computer-games industry experts, the project will develop mechanisms for assessing the suitability of older digital creative products (and/or individual IP assets (e.g. soundtrack, background art and/or individual character designs)) for deployment on digital platforms; addressing legal/technical barriers to deployment; and determining simple licensing arrangements for games content and individual IP assets.

The Dare Repository project will deliver sustainable long-term benefits to the University and the wider HE sector by establishing a framework under which new and legacy IP generated in the course of non-traditional research activities, competitions etc. could be made available to the wider public. The project will also promote innovation in the computer games industry and in the games education sector by making available the creative outputs of those whose work in competing in Dare to be Digital has previously been largely forgotten.

In an increasingly competitive jobs market, students are being encouraged to start their own businesses. Entrepreneur First and the Global Entrepreneurship Week are examples of this encouragement in practice. These startups are also vital to the UK economy. Henley Business School estimates that UK startups launched this year could add more than £360m to the UK economy in 2012 and create up to 70,000 jobs.

However in common with SMEs, student startups often lack the knowledge or funding to identify, protect and commercialise their IP. This project will address these concerns. The IPASS clinic will for the first time enable the University’s student startups to access on-campus IP advice from the University’s law students. The law students will be trained and supervised by academics from across the University campus specialising in IP law and related disciplines.

IPASS will therefore help establish a new generation of IP savvy student startups capable of utilising their IP for commercial advantage and therefore significantly increasing their chances of survival and growth. As a consequence IPASS will not only contribute to the economic renaissance of Portsmouth but will also enable other universities adopting this model to add to the economic prosperity of their own cities.

Commercialisation of their academic research base and supporting student enterprise are key missions of universities worldwide. These objectives are critical for the global economic competitiveness of the UK. Despite its significance, there is a need in many universities to improve the communication infrastructure regarding the promotion of student enterprise. For example, to better engage academic departments into the process and more effectively disseminate information about support services.

It is also recognised that university technology transfer offices (TTOs) often do not have sufficient resources to adequately deal with the large numbers of disclosures. Also, many projects progress painfully slow as the academics concerned do not necessarily have the time or commitment to the commercialisation aspects.

This proposal, therefore, intends to evaluate two mechanisms as a solution to the above problems: the creation of a web based communication platform to better engage all the stakeholders in the process of supporting student enterprise and the development of a cohort of student enterprise champions to work alongside the TTO supporting the acceleration of academic commercialisation projects. This will also give them relevant skills for developing their own businesses. The latter is also a mechanism for developing student’s entrepreneurial skills to improve their employability.

This project analyses the feasibility of using shared technology transfer protocols in regard to the research exemptions across different public sector institutions within the Bradford region. This project will identify best practice from the national and international sphere and subsequently investigate the potential of shared protocols in the progression of public sector innovation into the market place. This analysis will facilitate the further incorporation of intellectual property management protocols related to the research exemptions and will subsequently enable good decisions to be made from the ground upwards. The management of risk through increased knowledge of this area is hugely important and one of the ways to improve and increase capacity is through the investigation of shared services and protocols. The recent funding changes have further altered the relationship between the university and private sector and the reliance upon the research exemptions by researchers within further and higher education institutions is likely to present significant challenges to future research operations.

Creativity can be thought of as is the generation of new ideas (new Intellectual Property) whilst innovation is the exploitation of those ideas. 'Design' is what links creativity and innovation - it can shape ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers. By drawing on a completed pilot study and communicating the value of design with those knowledge/technology transfer.

The ‘Innovate for Universities’ (IfU) 2009/10 pilot was led by the Design Council with funding from BIS and HEFCE and design project funding from IfU tested the premise that design could be used to enhance commercialisation of University IP. The pilot gave TTOs access to a Design Council Design Associate (design Across 30 projects 80% reported reduced risk, 50% increased value of IP, 30% accelerated to market and 100% developed new approaches to commercialisation.

It is crucial that we capitalise on these outcomes and disseminate the key learnings. In partnership with the Design Council the University of Nottingham will manage a programme to implement sustainable use of design both within the pilot universities and across the HEI sector.

Case study (1.21Mb)

LCF has an unrivalled place in the fashion sector. Its researchers and academics are at the start of the pipeline for many innovative new products and services. LCF also hosts several of the sector's leading high profile innovation and business growth projects which support the sector’s entrepreneurs and SMEs.

The fashion sector is high profile, and ultimately invaluable to the UK economy. It directly generated £6.6billion of GVA to the UK in 09/10. This sector is capable of generating further significant +ve potential economic impacts if IP is considered, protected and commercialised at an earlier stage than is currently.

The researchers, academics, practitioners, graduates  and students at LCF, supported by IP and legal experts funded through this Project, will be provided with learnings and mechanisms for a new knowledge transfer model, which  will also be adaptable to other Creative Industries. It will be established within LCF’s Enterprise Team, which is currently under-resourced in IP protection and commercialisation know-how, and will capture relevant IP legal practices and understandings. Over 12-months they will build a knowledge bank and Tools that will be embedded throughout internal and external facing activities, to mitigate and reverse where possible, the loss of economic opportunity previously experienced.

Case study (216Kb)

In 2010 the University of Glasgow introduced a radical new model to accelerate the transfer of IP into commercial use. Easy Access IP offers a range of IP free of charge to companies or individuals so that they can exploit the knowledge for the benefit of UK society and the economy. We propose, with KCL and Bristol to create a consortium of open-innovation universities - the Easy Access Innovation Partnership - to adopt and further develop this model.

We will develop and promote the model to make translation of knowledge into use quicker, cheaper and simpler - removing bureaucratic and financial obstacles and accelerating the exchange and development of University generated IP for the benefit of the UK. Support for this innovative approach would enable us to: - develop a shared website on which the Easy Access model and all IP opportunities can be promoted. - develop and promote other Easy Access methods for materials/reagents/tools. - create standard agreements, removing administrative obstacles. - create awareness of the Easy Access Innovation approach to companies and other institutions, welcoming others to join. - organise a high profile Innovation Debate targeted at senior representatives from Higher Education, Business and the IPO.

Case study (325Kb)

MRC Harwell is based at Harwell Oxford, a national science and innovation campus. With 4,500 people in 150 organisations the campus is an ideal incubator for intensive knowledge transfer.

This proposal will pump-prime that process, achieving a critical mass of participants: 1,000 unique users of a new online portal, 100 people actively engaged in knowledge transfer and at least five collaborations started within 12 months. The appointment of a campus Innovation Manager in 2010 has transformed the quality and frequency of facilitated networking between PSREs and industrial organisations.  Successful collaborations have developed, but initial efforts demonstrate a prohibitive initial overhead required to place future efforts on a sustainable footing, given the difficulties in establishing cross-organisational funding.

We propose to:

• Create a unique cross-organisational campus information management system cataloguing available public and private sector expertise
• Trial an innovative combination of online and offline knowledge transfer techniques in the cross-disciplinary ‘Healthcare Technologies’ sector
• Create and share a best practice blueprint with other sectors and institutions.

This work will use a £74,500 grant to leverage over £77,000 of additional effort, and give credibility and momentum to the campus knowledge transfer program, thus unlocking significant future investment from individuals and organisations.

Case study (271Kb)

South East IP Bank is a ground breaking collaboration between the one of the country’s leading public sector research establishments, the National Physical Laboratory and four universities; Reading, Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL), Surrey and Sussex. The project will create a strong regional partnership based on a pool of IP held in a shared, cloud based database using well established 3rd party software system. Key elements of the project will be:

• Establishment of close working relationship and shared regional identity between the institutions' TT offices.
• Developing common methodologies for identifying patent families as well as joint marketing and fund raising activities.
• Sourcing pre-investment applied research or proof of concept funding to ensure that potential inventions are directed at an early stage toward high impact commercial or societal benefit.

SEIPB marks a beginning for intensified collaboration between UK PSREs and Universities to develop more effective routes to market for their research and provides a model that would be easy for other research institutions to replicate.

Case study (315Kb)

The E-Lucid project will improve the promotion and management of software, database and materials related intellectual property across University College London, one of the UK’s leading research intensive universities and more broadly across the UK HEI sector through participation of partners such as Cambridge University and Cancer Research Technology. The project builds upon the outcomes of a proof of concept project undertaken within UCL Business which has resulted in the development of a pilot portal for transacting academic and commercial software licenses across a sub-set of bioinformatics, image processing and materials modelling research and which has in less than 12 months been used to process over 800 licenses.

A series of development activities are proposed which will translate the pilot portal into a scalable electronic licensing framework that provides a simple, cost-effective mechanism for academic and commercial licensing activities across UCL ranging from biomedicine and engineering through to the arts and humanities and social sciences. These activities will be complemented by the creation of training and dissemination materials covering areas such as open source dual-licensing strategies to raise the awareness of UCL researchers to evolving licensing frameworks for their tools and technologies and stimulate the adoption of E-Lucid across UCL.

Case study (294Kb)

The market for smart phone applications ("Apps") represents a rapidly emerging and powerful commercial opportunity for software based innovation and associated intellectual property. Universities are in a strong position to realise this value however the typical and predominantly patent driven approach to technology transfer typically leaves research software based innovations "on the shelf".

This project will develop a new and effective model for rapid translation of university software innovations to marketable products in the form of smart phone applications that are protected by monitored copyright and trademarks as appropriate. A cost:benefit analysis of leveraging copyright opportunities and applying for trademarks will be included, together with mechanisms that increase the marketability and positioning of Apps such that maximum impact and revenues may be generated.

The "Software App Commercialisation Model" that would be developed would be disseminated in the form of a paper via existing higher education networks. The model will allow other universities to evaluate the sustainable benefits of channelling research software innovations to market via the Apple and Android mobile devices application platforms.

Case study (1.56Mb)

The Social Innovation In Business (SIIB) Project will establish a strategic partnership between UWE, The Dolphin Society and Bristol Benevolent Society (businesses providing social/economic benefits) with the aim of  helping social enterprise clients (Health, Social Care, and Energy sectors), technology and manufacturing businesses (UWE INET members), IP, accounting and legal professionals and business academics (social innovation, strategy areas) to capitalise on knowledge transfer from UWE’s research base.

SIIB will develop and embed best practice in these sectors & put knowledge transfer on a sustainable footing at UWE by connecting 120 different social enterprises with 20 practitioners & 10 strategic partners via a sustainable innovative online community allowing intellectual property (practitioners) & business focused input (from UWE research outputs in business strategy and innovation) can be shared.

SIIB clients will be given 'Innovation & IP Team' (consisting a UWE academic with broad practical experience; an IP, accounting, legal expert (strategic partners)) which will coach them to: identify, utilize and commercialise existing intellectual property assets; develop collaborations with other social enterprises through a series of practical workshops (one day exhibition at UWE (September)); & to manage and organise their intellectual property assets through participation in series of focused Social Innovation Drop-in Evenings (SIDEs) held at UWE.

Case study (228Kb)

To unlock the potential of innovations created with public money we need to make them visible and available under clear terms. For some digital materials, the most appropriate way to do this will be under 'open' licences such as open source or Creative Commons. We have developed a tool which helps developers and their supporting staff choose an open source licence.

By asking questions about their intentions, we rate available licences in order of appropriateness. We are keen to expand this software to include decision-support functionality for the stage before this - the decision whether open licensing is an appropriate exploitation model for the material in question. We would also like to provide exploitation model and licence selection support for other digital materials which might be appropriately released under licences like Creative Commons or the Open Database License.

OUCS has long-standing experience in both open source software (OSS Watch) and open content (Ripple & OpenSpires). Incorporating feedback from KT staff within Oxford and beyond, we believe this tool could be extremely useful across the sector, promoting innovation by unlocking access to a wealth of content and software that is currently languishing undistributed and unknown.

Case study (256Kb)

Inter-organisational collaboration on the commercialisation of IP has been widely touted as a solution to perceived failures in high value technology exploitation and is a pre-requisite to government initiatives such as TIC's. However, there are few good examples of "IP Pooling" or the use of shared services in IP exploitation, despite many expensive attempts to broker IP collaboration. One barrier is that combining the IP services of whole organisation is seen as too disruptive and that differences between institutions out-weigh their synergies. The field needs a good role model to demonstrate the improvements in productivity, rather than reductions in cost, that IP collaboration can produce.

Our aim is to take defined fields in two organisations, that are already functionally aligned, and develop a combined IP exploitation program that is greater than the sum of the parts. Exploiting a vacuum in structural support in one institution we should be able to introduce shared services without significant additional resources or disruption and take learnings that can be applied and communicated across the IP sector. Specifically, our request is solely for supporting resources and collaboration tools to highlight the program and produce a cost-effective and enduring collaboration.

Case study (206Kb)