The forum presents a chance for you to discover the various ways of collaborating with universities, and leveraging academic expertise to co-create innovative organisational and business solutions that will lead to greater socio-economic impact.

The forum also offers an opportunity for you to establish new connections, relationships, and partnerships with like-minded individuals and organisations, fostering a sense of shared purpose and community.

Challenges

What challenges are you experiencing that might be addressed through innovation? What opportunities are out there that you could take advantage of by participating in an innovation project? (We’re using Innovate UK’s definition of an innovation project, which is a project that aims to develop new products, processes or services)

How can universities help you to innovate? Can we identify alignment between universities’ research strengths and your innovation challenges? (bearing in mind that academics/researchers are driven by real-world challenges). Where there is alignment, how can we set up partnerships & collaborative innovation projects?

Funding mechanisms

What funding mechanisms are there to help fund innovation projects? We’ll talk about three mechanisms in particular:Impact funds - eg the Third Sector Innovation seedcorn fund, which internal university pots of funding that can be used to fund short innovation projects.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) - which fund innovation projects of 1-3 years’ duration.

Student projects – can be a very useful way to start working with universities through paid internships and projects.

Looking ahead, it is evident that complex challenges such as economic inequality, social justice, the exponential proliferation of data and the insights and formulae that exist within, increasingly complex agency partnerships, an ageing population, and climate change can only be resolved through collaboration and cooperation. By establishing a forum, working together and pooling our unique strengths and experiences, we can achieve a collective impact that would be impossible to attain alone.

To read about an example which highlights the socioeconomic impact of a KTP project, please see this KTP case study.

*Please keep checking this page for updates!

Bristol Third Sector Innovation Forum