Oral evidence: Business-University collaborationHC 249-iiTuesday 17 June 2014

Oral evidence, 17 June 2014.

Witnesses

Dr Charles King, Operations Director, YASA Motors Ltd, Dr Shpend Gerguri, Senior Lecturer, Engineering Design, Oxford Brookes University, Dr Diana Limburg, Senior Lecturer, Information Management, Oxford Brookes Business School, and Michael Dibben, Partner and Chief Executive, Brethertons LLP, gave evidence.

Chair

Good afternoon and thank you very much for agreeing to be our second panellists. I will just start by asking you to introduce yourselves and your specific titles, and then we will get stuck into the questions.

Dr King

Charles King. I am Operations Director at YASA Motors, a spin-out from Oxford University.

Dr Gerguri

I am Shpend Gerguri, Senior Lecturer in Engineering Design at Oxford Brookes University.

Dr Limburg

I am Diana Limburg. I am a Senior Lecturer in Information Management, also at Oxford Brookes University.

Michael Dibben

I am Michael Dibben. I am Chief Executive Officer at Brethertons LLP. We are a medium-sized law firm based in Oxfordshire and Warwickshire.

Chair

Thanks very much. I will just repeat what you may have heard me say to the previous panel. Please do not feel that you all have to answer every question, otherwise we could be here for a very long time. Indeed, my first question is to you, Charles, and you, Michael. We have had many submissions that said the university and research knowledge base is very difficult for businesses to navigate, which is a significant challenge to effective collaboration. How did you find the research expertise that your respective organisations needed? Could you give a clue to others how you would navigate this particular journey?

Dr King

I can answer from my perspective. I come from a background that has had a strong relationship between universities and company, so I have not found that to be a challenge to us at YASA. I understand the university system and I know where to look for the expertise that I need to find. That has not been a difficulty. I would go on to the EPSRC website, for instance, and look for the research available in the UK and where the research expertise is.

Chair

No doubt you are perfectly familiar with all these acronyms, but if you could just give them in full at least for the first time.

Dr King

Okay—the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s website. They have on there where the research excellence is. Then I would go specifically to find that. It was just fortunate in our instance that the research excellence that I needed was in a local university.

Michael Dibben

It was rather different from our perspective. We were not accustomed to using or exploiting the assistance of academia in our strategic thinking, so this was really a very novel concept, I would say. We were introduced originally to the prospect of this knowledge-transfer partnership through our local chamber of commerce—the Banbury Chamber of Commerce—and they put us in touch with Oxford Brookes. We did not really know what to expect. We approached them originally with the concept that we were investing a lot of money in a new practice-management system and that we had a considerable change-management process to undergo in our organisation and were not entirely sure how they could help us. I have to say we were very pleasantly surprised at how readily they understood our business and grasped the concepts that were affecting us as a legal business, and they have been extremely helpful to us since. It has been a very successful collaboration, but I am not sure that I would have found it myself; it was the fact that we were introduced to it that really did the trick for us.

Chair

Arising from what has been said, it is almost a very personal route; you just happened to know the person who knew the person there. That does seem to underline the difficulty that some businesses may have that perhaps have not got that inside knowledge. Is there anything that you think should be done to assist in that respect?

Michael Dibben

I would have to say that there should be more promotion and publicity of the knowledge-transfer partnership, certainly. As I say, we would not have heard of it ourselves, I am sure; it was something that was introduced to us. Therefore, I am sure the Government could certainly do more to promote it. I also understand that we are the first law firm that has ever taken advantage of it. In all the conferences and other networking events that I go to through the Law Society and various other channels, I have never heard anybody else speak about it.

Chair

No; it is the first time I have heard of it. Charles, have you anything you wish to add on that?

Dr King

It is a real challenge to promote the wide variety of acronyms to the industry at large, whether in the science space or in the commerce space. There are two aspects. One is that one needs to know that one has a problem that can be resolved by someone else and not merely by the capabilities within the team. Secondly, knowing that one has the problem, one then starts searching. We are fortunate today that we have an internet we can search with. It was much more challenging in the past. Nevertheless, I recall way back, my uncle, who now would be in his 94th year, was sent off to university by a local industry to do a PhD. Industry has had contacts with the university base for a long time and it has been typically through personal knowledge and knowing that you have the problem.

Chair

Can I just ask you a supplementary? Which was the most important factor in getting you to decide which particular academic institution to collaborate with? Was it reputation, location, research expertise, or what?

Dr King

Certainly from our perspective, YASA Motors is a high-tech industry and a spin‑out from Oxford University and one might think, therefore, that there would be a natural bent to look back towards the university we spun out from. Indeed we did not. I had, through previous experience, had very strong connections with Brookes University through some consultancy I did with Siemens. It was knowledge of Brookes University’s Joining Technology Research Centre that was important to us. I could find that at Brookes and there was not such a facility with quite the same levels of expertise that I could find easily within Oxford University. And it is down to people. A technology is delivered by people, and that we already had those contacts and the expertise was there was valuable to us. I would add to that and say that, whereas Rolls-Royce could invest in a technology centre for 10 years and in the first two years teach that academic institution everything that Rolls-Royce knows and then get something back, SMEs and start-ups like ourselves cannot do that. I need to go to someone who already has the expertise. I have not got the time to teach them. I need them to immediately tell me something I do not know and have facilities that I can have access to. I was fortunate that Brookes was on site local to us, but had it been elsewhere in the country, I would have followed it to there as well, because the expertise was the more important thing, rather than the location.

Michael Dibben

In several ways I suppose this is similar. We did not go through any selection process in choosing the university; we were introduced to Oxford Brookes. We met the team there, including Diana, and found that we got on very well and we immediately found that there was something they could offer us and, based on that, we went ahead. The fact that they were local was definitely a factor; I am not sure it would have worked if we had been at the other end of the country from them. You can communicate in all sorts of ways now, but for a project like this you do need to be in geographical close proximity to have the meetings to make it work.

Mr Walker

This partly reflects on what Dr King was just saying: that SMEs have less time and less money available to go out than perhaps the likes of Rolls‑Royce and find the right partners. There is academic research that the Committee has been presented with that shows that one of the things that puts SMEs off from engaging with universities in the first place is the investment of time and money that they think it will take in order to establish and then maintain a relationship. From the perspective of your two businesses, to what extent should that be seen as a barrier and to what extent can it be seen as an opportunity—that you get support that repays your time and money quite quickly?

Michael Dibben

From the experience we have had so far, the latter is true; you definitely do get the benefit of it. Going back to where I was a year ago, I am ashamed to say it probably would not have even occurred to me that we could have got that level of expertise through some scheme of collaboration, whether it is a KTP or anything else, by liaising with a university. It was something quite novel for us, as I have said, and I have been extremely impressed with what we have gained from it.

Dr King

Yes. It has been extraordinarily valuable for us to have ready access to the Brookes team. They had the expertise we required. It was very easy for us to liaise and work with the team there. I say again that the technology is delivered by people. If it is a small group, it is very important that within that group there is someone who has the willingness to liaise and to work with the industry.

Mr Walker

Clearly, relationship management is key. Perhaps bringing in the members of the panel from Brookes as well, what would you say are the key elements to relationship management between business and university?

Dr Gerguri

I will just give a bit of background. I have been involved in two KTPs. Having a system that supports you through the process is very important. Relationship can be one thing, but if you do not have the process in place to take that process through, that could be an issue. Again, within Brookes we have a very good research and business development office that mediates between academics and the industry. For me personally, that has been a very useful and, to date, very successful way of collaborating with the industry.

Dr Limburg

I would second that. I would also go back to the importance of the building of the relationship. We are now for the first time having a KTP with a law firm. You need to really start to understand. It is not just that; they are embarking on something they have never done before and it is proper business research, so it is not something that has been written down in the business field either. You are doing something quite adventurous for both partners. You are not going to do that if you do not feel good about each other, if you cannot communicate and if you do not—I would even say—trust each other. That is also linked to that sense that, “Yes, there is a risk involved. It is exciting, it is new and it is novel, so it might not work out.” You need to trust each other and communicate about where things are going right and where things are maybe a little bit tricky. I would definitely say that the relationship is core, supported, indeed, by processes that force you also to take stock very regularly so that you do not get halfway down the line and think, “We had really great ideas, but it is just not working out”.

Dr King

Part of your question was about the cost of engagement. It is a very tolerable cost. We are a start-up; we are VC-funded. When I first started with the company, there were four of us. We needed access to capital equipment and expertise very quickly. There was no way we could have done that were it not with an engagement with a university knowledge base. The cost of that engagement was small in comparison with the loss of the company. Those types of decisions have to be made on a regular basis.

Mr Walker

One of the other challenges in bringing together businesses and academia is often working to very different time scales. I just wonder if that is something that has come up in the relationships between the companies and academic institutions in this sense.

Dr King

One of the benefits of SMEs, and particularly start-ups, is their agility and their ability to move very quickly. We move, typically, at the speed of light, and it is a tricky thing to engage with universities if they are unable to accommodate and at least understand why we are wanting to push at the speed we are. That is another feature of the UK system; if you can find the right people, they will move at those speeds. In our instance, we have had one KTP that has already succeeded and finished and indeed we recruited the associate at the end, and we have started another one. The benefits to us are very strong contacts with the university and doing the longer-term projects, but also being able to draw on that academic excellence to help us with immediate problems. It is very much in how one engages and knowing what the university is capable of.

Dr Gerguri

Can I add to that? That is a very valid point, because I can see it from the point of view also of a mismatch of expectations between academia and industry. One important aspect is for academics to realise that industry works to certain commercial constraints, not necessarily at the same pace academia works. As long as you as an academic realise that and you have certain deadlines, but equally you have a vested interest, I do not think that is an issue. Certainly it has not been in my case. As long as we realise that there are commercial constraints, perhaps that is something that can help the academics.

Michael Dibben

I merely add to that that there is a similar argument that businesses have to recognise that what they are investing in here is something that is not a very quick fix; this is a longer-term project. For instance, at the time when we were first looking at this, we could have approached it on the basis that we had a new computer system to set up and we wanted somebody to make it work instantly. That would not be something that would work in this sort of partnership. For us, it was much more a longer-term project and it was far more to do with using the knowledge that was out there much better and change management to make sure that we adapted to the rigours and demands that we were facing as part of the changes in the legal world.

Mr Walker

From the university’s perspective, how do you balance that need to work with businesses on a time scale that is reasonable to them, to meet deadlines and so on, with the academic freedom that you need as a university and for your students to develop and for your academics to continue to develop in their careers?

Dr Gerguri

Now that I have been—I keep repeating myself—in two KTPs, I would not just call it a knowledge-transfer partnership; I would, rather, call it a knowledge-exchange partnership, because it is a two-way process. I am going there not only to impart knowledge; I am going there to also bring some knowledge back to our students. That is one side: feeding back into our students by various means, such as case studies. In terms of meeting the deadlines and constraints, the due process that we have to go through as part of the KTP process lays out what we need to achieve by certain dates—certain deadlines and certain outcomes. As long as you follow that due process and you allocate time, which is captured in your workload plan within the institution, that is one way of dealing with it.

Dr Limburg

I would agree with that. It is incredibly important to set aside time on a very regular basis to work on the partnership. That does not go against any academic work pace; it is just the project goes on and it has got its deadlines. The partner has got their deadlines, but it also goes back to that bit of communication. The partner cannot expect us to move faster than we can. Sometimes it works the other way round. As Michael says, sometimes we just say, “Look, you are going too fast here. If you do this now, you are going to regret it—you are going to go down a path that is not in your best interest. Step back. We are going to think this through properly first.” It definitely works both ways.

Paul Blomfield

I wonder if I could move to the commercial risks involved in KTPs and ask Charles and Michael perhaps first to reflect on whether they see any commercial risk from their point of view as businesses.

Dr King

Is this commercial risk in liaising with a university and therefore losing control of IP?

Paul Blomfield

Yes.

Dr King

The way the KTPs are set up—and, indeed, prior to them, the Teaching Company Schemes, which I have also had some experience of—there is a collaboration agreement that exists between, in our instance, the commercial enterprise, YASA Motors, and Brookes University as to where the IP will be used. The industry needs to understand that the raison d’être of the knowledge base is to publish and to move the knowledge base forward. We recognise that when we set the objectives and when we agree the collaboration agreement as to where the IP will lie—where the foreground and background of the IP is. Those risks we manage right from the very early stage, and it has not been a reason for not engaging with the universities, either in this particular instance or in the other universities we have engagement with. It is not an issue. We have to deal with it, but it is not an issue.

Michael Dibben

From the perspective of somebody who has only recently applied for a KTP for the first time, it was certainly something that was at the forefront of our thoughts when it came to discussing the terms of the agreement. Our initial fears were, I suppose, first of all that we might risk losing data that were in some way confidential; we had to protect our customer data and a lot of the knowledge that we had built up over the years. But there is a clear distinction to be made between pre-existing data and knowledge that you gain as a result of a collaborative partnership. We understood from the outset that that was the deal. As Charles has said, the whole purpose is to create more knowledge that is going to be available generally; it was not a partnership that was to create something just for us. It probably came as a little bit of a shock—it goes a little bit against the grain for a lawyer that we are creating some knowledge and then going to publish it across the world—but then the world is changing generally. There is so much knowledge that is available out there generally and available very cheaply, if not free, that we have moved away from a time when you really had to protect everything you learned and keep it very secret from everybody, because nowadays you can be pretty sure that somebody else knows it and somebody else has published it somewhere out there. Rather, it is the opposite; nowadays the onus is on the business to select the right knowledge that is available from that big bank of knowledge that is out there—the knowledge that is right for their business and that fits in with their culture. That is much more where we see the challenge, rather than clinging desperately to something that we think we really must protect against anyone who might be able to snoop.

Paul Blomfield

That seems rather reflective, looking back on the process. When you first thought, “This is going to be shared more widely”, did that make you double take as to whether that was the right vehicle?

Michael Dibben

Yes, that is a fair point. That is absolutely right. That was something that certainly we considered at the outset, but it really hit home when we got the first draft of the collaboration agreement; that was the clause that immediately sprang out: “Wait a minute. We really are giving away knowledge here.” As I say, once you make the distinction between pre-existing knowledge that you have to keep secret anyway and knowledge that is going to be gained as a result of this whole project, it is fairly easy to understand the reason why it does need to be available and, hopefully, will be published and other people will make use of it.

Paul Blomfield

What about from the point of view of universities? What are the risks for universities of this sort of partnership?

Dr Limburg

I am not really in a position to speak for the university there, but from the perspective of the—

Paul Blomfield

From the perspective of the higher education sector and your experience of it.

Dr Limburg

For the sort of research that I would publish, where we are developing knowledge in the partnership, I would say it is just good, because you are creating more knowledge than there was and you have got all the opportunities to make that public. We get support from central university in the process of putting those agreements together and, as the team doing the KTP, we are only sideways involved in that. I do not get the impression that the university sees a risk in terms of intellectual property.

Dr Gerguri

If I may just add to that, it is our legal department that deals with the IP issues, but it is important for us as academics to remember two things. There are commercial rights that will belong to the company—it is not something I am involved in directly—but equally, it is important for us to ring‑fence our academic rights so we are able to use some of that knowledge in, or feed it back into, our teaching.

Dr King

It would be valuable to avoid a situation where the university is seeking to gain licence income in order to fund itself. If that becomes the main driver for the university income, then the university is competing with the industry in that respect. One does not see that at present, but if we were to do deals with universities where the university has a very high right to exploit the IP, specifically in order to fund itself, then that could become a problem. Presently, that is not the issue, and good strong negotiation goes on and a good deal is done.

Paul Blomfield

You can see why that sort of arrangement might be quite tempting for universities.

Dr King

Very much so. The TSB collaboration agreement is on fair and equitable terms and therefore it is the understanding of what that “fair and equitable” term is; that is where the negotiation comes. The university, in addition, gains the insight into the problems of the industry. The previous panel were talking about doing blue-sky research and that which has impact. In order to have impact, you have to know where the problems are. That is one of the issues of the relationships that industry has with the university: to reveal what the problems are. In so doing, that gives relevance to some of the work that universities are engaged in.

Paul Blomfield

Which is when it becomes more of an exchange than a transfer.

Dr King

Absolutely.

Paul Blomfield

Can I just explore, perhaps with Michael, a little bit more that issue that we were touching on? Clearly, most academics and universities want to publish their research as soon as possible, and some public funders will demand that. How does that objective interact with the priorities of business to control research that they have been involved with? You have talked very philosophically about it, but practically.

Michael Dibben

Yes. That is probably because we are at a fairly early stage in the project, so we have not yet got to a point where we feel that we have created something that is going to be incredibly valuable to business or to academic research or anything else out there. If it were, I would probably just echo what Charles says, that the terms would have to be negotiated. I do not think the temptation would be to become super-controlling over it. That probably sounds a bit odd coming from a lawyer, because you know what we are like, but we would recognise that this is something we, again, need to collaborate on. We have got to be fair. I might differ slightly from Charles, in that if there were a commercial opportunity that we could both gain something from, I do not see why we should not explore that as long as the terms were fair to both.

Paul Blomfield

Charles, what about this issue of the urge to publish versus businesses’ desire to control that information?

Dr King

Within the KTP we have recently finished and the one we are presently involved in, the need to publish is there. The value of publishing in the first KTP was low; there was not a substantial amount that was going to add to the general knowledge out in the world, and therefore it did not seem appropriate for the university to want to do that. There may well be in the second one, which is more research-y; there is more risk associated with it and therefore the bounds we are breaking may be a little higher. We will address those as they come along. In general, in the relationship between industry and universities, particularly when one is funding students to complete a programme of work in which they may get a degree at the end, the commercial enterprise has an opportunity to restrict the publication. For instance, a PhD can be restrained for three years. I am sure that same situation would happen with MSc theses and so forth, but it would be for a limited period to give the industry a chance to take advantage of the space. In the ones that we have running at present, there is the potential for that and we will need to look at that. The collaboration agreement deals with it very easily; the university can write and then there is a joint review of the paper and what information is going to be revealed.

Paul Blomfield

That is very helpful. Thank you.

Mike Crockart

If I can turn now to admin and the setting-up of a KTP, I would like to just ask a few questions about how you found that process. First of all, did you find it unduly bureaucratic to set up a knowledge-transfer partnership or did it have the right balance and give you the appropriate level of certainty that you required?

Michael Dibben

Is it okay if I start, perhaps on the basis that I have done this more recently, and for the first time more recently? It was surprisingly arduous, I would say, to go through the process of the initial application. Having said that, I do recognise that we are talking about a substantial contribution here from TSB and they are not just going to give away the money to anyone; you have got to present a very good and strong case for what you are trying to do with your project. I fully understand that. However, my recollection is that we went through approximately a two-month process of filling in the form, sending it to the regional adviser—by the way, I should have mentioned that is something we could not have achieved it without; it is essential that the adviser is there—her going through it with a red pen and sending it back to us, us re-doing it, and her accepting those changes but then saying, “Because you have done that, you have now got to re-do what you did in the first place”. That whole process seemed to go backwards and forwards for about two months. There were certainly one or two occasions where I almost felt that we would have to give up; it was getting so hard that I was wondering whether it really was worth it. In terms of the manpower that was going into providing all this information to make the application, was that going to outweigh the benefit that we were going to get? I am glad we did go through with it, because we are gaining far more, but I would say that I could quite understand that other potential applicants could find that whole process something of a deterrent.

Mike Crockart

So that help that you got was from the TSB regional rep. Without that, you probably would not have managed to get through the process.

Michael Dibben

I do not think our application would have been successful—put it that way. We thought that we had put together a pretty good application first time round and I would say the amount of red pen on it that came back from the first go was probably about 80%.

Mike Crockart

Something that you would not be used to as a lawyer.

Michael Dibben

Absolutely not.

Mike Crockart

Charles, was it the same process for you?

Dr King

As you might imagine, it is somewhat less of a challenge to us, because we have dealt with TSB on a number of occasions so we understand the format, and that helps a great deal. There are details of looking into the future, which is a real challenge for a VC start-up—an early-stage company. We have aspirations of how we think the world will look in three years’ time, but whether it does or not very much depends on how the market grows and how the business grows. There is some information that seems excessive, but nevertheless it helps focus the mind. Less, in terms of administration, speeds things up, but it does focus. Certainly from our experience, the second one was much easier than the first one to put together, because we knew what we were doing better. Indeed, I would say again that our TSB associate, Gill Rysiecki, was a great help to us in guiding us as to what the TSB is looking for and how we could meet those needs.

Mike Crockart

Can I just probe a little bit, Michael, the 80% that came back with red pen through it? What types of areas was it that you had gone down a blind alley on and not given the information that they had been looking for?

Michael Dibben

My recollection is that a lot of the fault—I am ashamed to say—was in the figures. What we had put in one section did not match what we had put in another. That was partly because of the way some of the questions were worded; we were not entirely sure what they were getting at. One of the reasons for the adviser is to be able to say, “Look, if you are saying that you are expecting to grow by X% per year—whatever you have put down in that section—you cannot then say in section so-and-so that you expect your net profit to be something that is way out of sync with that”. I am putting that in very simplistic terms, but the advice was absolutely correct; she was finding holes in places where what we had said in one section of the form in isolation made sense but did not quite match with what we had said somewhere else.

Mike Crockart

So not errors that an accountants’ firm would have made, perhaps.

Michael Dibben

Exactly, yes.

Mike Crockart

Charles, you have already gone through the process again, so the bureaucracy was not something that was off‑putting.

Dr King

Not at all, no. The benefits are substantial to us. It was really important for YASA Motors to have a relationship with a knowledge base, and particularly the one we have chosen because of their expertise there, that gave us access to that. It is a longer-term project that we are on—it is a two-year project that we have embarked upon—but within that two‑year project, we have access to the academics and capital equipment that we would not otherwise have had. There is a whole raft of benefits that we derive from having the relationship with the knowledge base and with Brookes. We also needed to do this work. It was too high a risk for us to do internally, nor did we have the expertise, so it was an ideal project of work for the university to be dealing with.

Mike Crockart

Michael, what about you? I get the impression that you feel the benefits have outweighed the issues of the application already, even at this early stage.

Michael Dibben

That is absolutely right. We are already seeing benefits in terms of the way we have been able to change the way we work through the introduction of the associate that we now have. It has made a considerable difference to the way we work and probably considerably faster than we would have expected at the outset.

Mike Crockart

If I can turn now to the implementation phase of your agreements, because these are contractual agreements; they have outcomes and added value that is expected to be delivered. How well did that process work? How well were the outcomes that you had agreed across both sides delivered?

Dr King

I mentioned at the beginning of the KTP we were a year out from Oxford University; we were maybe seven or eight people by that stage, planning on what the world was going to look like in two years’ time and initiating a market. This is technology push; we are pushing a very new technology into the market. It is a challenge to predict exactly what is going to happen. Business plans change. The aspirations that we had commercially were not entirely met. A number of them were, but our proposal to grow the business at the rate we had wanted was maybe too aspirational. It will happen; it will just happen maybe two years later. Trying to match those plans, particularly for an early-stage business, is more challenging, I suggest. Nevertheless, the technology that we developed during that two-year period was absolutely what we needed and has delivered exactly what we had planned. On that side of things, we did precisely what we said we would, so that was ideal.

Michael Dibben

I would say from our point of view it is probably a little early in the process to be able to judge the outcomes. In terms of the growth aspirations, as far as turnover is concerned, we are fairly confident that we will achieve that even sooner, but we have to work more on profitability; that is the real challenge for us, and it is all part of the process. The real benefits that we have seen so far are much more to do with changing the way we do things, making sure that everything we do—all the activities and projects that we undertake—is properly aligned to our strategic thinking and not done on a whim or on the basis of something that just sounded good. That is the big change.

Mike Crockart

That was going to be my next question: has going through this process had an effect in your organisations more widely? Has it changed the way that you look at projects, the way that you develop new products or anything else that you do?

Michael Dibben

That is very much the key to what we have achieved so far. In the past, as I say, we tended to take on new ideas on the basis that somebody would come up with something, present it to the management board and, if it sounded good, we would delegate to somebody to form a project team and get on with it and then, two years later, we would think, “Whatever happened to that project, then? Oh, yes, it either never got off the ground or we spent an awful lot of money but never achieved anything.” Now, our KTP associate has formed what we call a value integration office, with the main purpose of assessing these new ideas as they come in, measuring impact against risk and then helping to produce a proper business plan, which is then presented to the board for approval—if, indeed, it gets that far. If it is approved and it goes through the process of development and implementation, the value integration office will then monitor and assess progress against the specified outcomes. We are much more structured and much more strategic in what we will take on and, as a result, we will restrict the number of projects we do, so some people will be disappointed, but it is far better to do that at the outset than take things on and then not have the resources to fulfil them, as we were guilty of in the past. That is a very big change.

Dr Limburg

Can I just add something to that? This KTP is a business KTP; there is not a technological project being developed, and this value integration office is not something that really exists. As far as we talk about outcomes and whether outcomes have been achieved, from the university’s perspective, yes, we are in that sense ahead of schedule. A real value integration office has been put in place in a very challenging context and we can play around with it, if you like, to develop the concept further and make it work for Brethertons but also develop it as a concept that would be transferrable to other businesses and would be highly publishable. Coming back to that idea of outcomes, they are not just on their end; they are certainly also on our end, and they are being realised.

Mike Crockart

You are all painting quite a rosy picture of how it all works and how, although it was a bit difficult at the start, everything is looking pretty good. Are there any barriers still out there to the effective working of knowledge-transfer partnerships that you can see?

Dr King

Knowledge-transfer partnerships come in a variety of different lengths of studentship. The ones we have engaged with have tended to be the two-year ones. We have two sandwich students starting with us. We have had them before. We are now four years out from the university and we have had one for a year. We have seen that as a way of engaging for a longer period of time with students on site, but that loses the academic link, if you will; we just have the students on site. If the same level of effort were necessary to get a six-week placement, that would be a challenge. I do not believe it is, but that is something that we would need to have a look at, because one can get much shorter-period relationships with a knowledge base. That is something we need to look at: very specific problems that have a short term and where we are calling on particular expertise. That is something we would need to have a look at and might be a barrier.

Mike Crockart

So going through the bureaucracy is fine if it is for a longer-term project, but for a shorter-term one it would write it off.

Dr King

It would be much more challenging and we might approach it by a different route.

Mike Crockart

What about others on the panel? Everyone looks quite happy.

Dr Limburg

Adding to that, yes, I am quite happy, in the sense that it brings together a lot of the things that, particularly in a business faculty, you would expect to make people happy. It is working with business partners; it is working at the cutting edge. It is exciting. You are moving things forward. You are bringing things back into teaching and into research. There is not an awful lot not to like about it. Are all partnerships really brilliant all the time? Of course not. It is a partnership and it is a real-world problem in a real‑world organisation. I know of one KTP I am sideways involved with where there have been personnel changes at the business partner that have made it much more complicated. You are vulnerable to things like that, but there are support structures in place to try to deal with that, so I do not think there are a huge amount of issues there. As a vehicle it is really good.

Mike Crockart

My final question, then, is to the university representatives. How much more of this could you do? Is the capacity there? From what I see from the figures, there are 672 KTPs on the go at the moment and they are supposed to use up pretty much all the funding that there is available. Is there a vast market out there that could be being tapped into that you are unable to?

Dr Gerguri

My view is it all depends whether you can match what the industry is looking for with the knowledge base. In other words, do you have a system or—shall we say—knowledge brokers in the middle that can say, “Well, industry needs these problems solved. Can we match these problems to some knowledge base in the university?” Is the capacity there? I do believe it is in there; it is just how we mediate that. How we do that I am not entirely sure. Two of my KTPs were based on some personal links that I had. They were students who graduated from our department and then went on to employment; one of them after 10 years contacted me asking whether I could I do some contract testing, and then we discussed the KTP. My view is: can we have some kind of a knowledge broker in the middle that can try to map what the industry needs and what we can offer? Do we have the time? If we go through that due process and we see who can do what, I am sure they can find people.

Dr Limburg

I would second that. To be honest, the key bit is to get businesses through the door of the university. As Michael says, once we are talking, it can be made perfectly clear how a contribution can be made and how both partners can benefit from that. A lot of businesses never get to the point of even trying to talk, partly because they would not know who to talk to or what about or, as Charles was saying, that they have a problem that would benefit from the involvement of a university partner. If we can get more businesses to come and talk to universities, we have got people in place who will be that first port of call and will then, within the university, help the business partner to navigate and find the right specific people to talk to.

Dr King

The industry’s problems are polymath problems. By that, what I mean is that it helps if you have someone who has a holistic view of that area of industry to be able to understand what the issues are and then relate that from the industry’s side into the university and vice versa. For some three years I worked as a technology translator for the TSB, working with some 50 different companies with very wide breadth of background, but then I started off life as a physicist, I moved into material science and then spent a year in post-doc in chemical engineering, and worked for corporate research labs, of which only one still exists. Although others are rising here, the Cookson Group research lab, which was out at Begbroke just up here, closed down, and the company has divided. Johnson Matthey Research, which I also worked for, still exists. Those companies that retain a research base produce individuals who have polymath outlooks, particularly if it is a vertically integrated company; you have a very much broader view. Those are the people who can do the translation between what the industry has as a problem and what the universities need to understand. Those individuals are fewer now; people are more focused, with less of that knowledge base, so it is more challenging.

Michael Dibben

I would really just endorse what has been said. Businesses do not understand what help is available from the universities. Even if they understand that there might be some help there, they do not know who they should turn to. If more could be done to achieve that bridge to get that knowledge of what help is available, that could be hugely beneficial to business generally.

Chair

Just a couple of questions to finish off with. I suppose the next one, in a way, is slightly personal. You are all academics, at least up to a point. Has the collusion and collaboration with business affected your academic careers?

Dr Gerguri

I think it has affected it for the good in this case. One thing we need to realise, in my view, as academics is that we need to contribute to the economy now. The usual academic attitude is just that you publish research and that is where the story ends, but nowadays you want that research to have an impact, and seeing it work within a commercial context can only be a good thing. So, yes, it has changed my mode of operation—let us put it that way. In anything I do nowadays—even with the students at undergraduate level—I try to think, “Has this thing got a bit of IP we could use?” Yes.

Dr Limburg

I would second that. I almost see myself as a portfolio academic. I love teaching, I like doing research and I love working with businesses. In that sense, it really helps to make my job much more fulfilling. It is really great to see a direct impact of all the things that we talk about, research and teach, and it actually making a difference. It is not something abstract; it is not something where somebody—as particularly happens in business teaching—says, “Yeah, right, well that sounds great in theory but that is not how the real world works”. You know, actually, it does work like that, and it works better because of our involvement there. In that sense, it is really helpful to broaden the portfolio and inform each element of being an academic. Ultimately, hopefully it also feeds into the three and four‑star journal publications that we are all wanting.

Chair

Yes. Has it enhanced your academic institution, do you think?

Dr Limburg

Yes, definitely, for those same reasons. People have a higher estimation of the institution, particularly if you are teaching business but it is probably the same if you are teaching engineering, if it works in the real world. That is where the proof of our existence lies. In that sense it helps the institution. It is good for its reputation. It is good for us teaching better and more interesting things, and it is good for the institution producing direct impact and being able to publish things that are very relevant.

Chair

Can I just conclude with this question? How would you measure whether a KTP has been successful? What are the criteria, hallmarks or benchmarks that you would use to evaluate it?

Dr King

First of all, by asking the participants. I would seek to look to the participants to see how they respond to the interaction. Commercially, I would look not immediately; I would look at least two, maybe three, years out. It very much depends, I suspect, on the size of the business that one is looking at as to what that timeframe would need to be. It is useful to see a commercial impact. There is value in looking at that from the input that the TSB has put in. That value just needs to be looked at over maybe a longer timeframe for different company structures. Those are already reviewed; that type of information is already gathered at the end of a KTP to see how the KTP has run, whether it was a successful relationship and, indeed, whether the relationship wants to continue, so there is another valuable input there. Had we not continued it as a KTP, we would have sought some way of continuing our relationship with the academics that we are working with at Brookes University and with that team, because they have a knowledge base and resources that are valuable to us.

Chair

Does anybody want to add to that?

Michael Dibben

Again, it is probably fairly early days for us to start thinking about end measures. Perhaps it is not; perhaps that is exactly what we should be doing at this stage. I think you are able to measure the success. As far as our business is concerned, what we have seen is something that I would call thinking and acting like a business. We were guilty as a law firm of behaving far too much like a law firm and we knew we had to change. We are now beginning, at least, to think far more like a commercial organisation. We are properly planning for the future and we are making sure that everything we do is properly aligned to our strategic priorities and objectives. At the end of the two-year period, we should be able to see how that has affected our success and our ways of dealing with things over that time when we look back as to how we were beforehand.

Dr Gerguri

If I may just add to that, it is also worth mentioning our KTP regional advisers because they make sure that the KTP is on track and delivering value. There are mechanisms in place that ensure that is happening.

Dr Limburg

You write down how much more money has been made and whether all those interim things that you promised you would do have been delivered or how they have changed. There is also that general sense in how you measure success of, “How much have we actually all learned?” Learning is a really important part of that: at the end of it, what do we know that we did not know when we started out? It is not just knowledge transfer or even just knowledge exchange; it is a knowledge-creation partnership and it should be measured against the amount of knowledge that has been created.

Chair

Thank you. That is probably an appropriate note on which to finish the proceedings, but I will just ask if any of my colleagues have any further questions. No. Thank you very much. That has been incredibly helpful. I will repeat what I said to the previous panel. If you feel that we should have asked you a question but did not, but you would like to answer it, then please feel free to submit us supplementary evidence, and we may well decide that there are further questions we would like to ask you and would be grateful for your co-operation in replying. Thank you very much. Oral evidence: Business-University collaboration, HC 249-ii 2