Marshalling Resources: Exploring academic partnerships to drive new opp

Tapping into academic skills, resources and capacity can be a powerful way to explore and unlock innovative new products, service and processes for your business, organisation, freelance practice or network. It can also help you think differently about how you approach problems, create additional resource to develop and test ideas and offer valuable support to realise your ambitions more fully.

Although deeper collaborative relationships between academia and the creative, heritage and business sectors holds significant potential, bringing these elements and their distinctive talents together for mutual benefit can be challenging. In this insightful session, Professor Steve Love, School of Innovation and Technology (SIT) at Glasgow School of Art, will offer an overview of their dynamic knowledge exchange ambitions, discuss the specific support programmes networks can access— and look at how this relationship could pave the way for exciting new possibilities.

This interactive online workshop will offer an overview of SIT’s design-led innovation

approach and how they could support your businesses, organisations or networks regardless of scale or capacity to engage in the below key areas:

Take an active part in co-designed activities to enable capacity building and knowledge exchange to collaboratively uncover new opportunities.

Design, prototype and evaluate new services, applications and work practices.

Bring cutting-edge thinking into your business to tackle cultural, social and economic challenges, unlock new opportunities and increase innovation more meaningfully.

Carol-Ann Adams, Business Engagement Executive at Interface, will also provide an overview of how they can help make your links with academia work, including the potential to access small innovation grants.

The event will also offer attendees the opportunity to discuss their specific projects in more detail, find out how SIT and Interface could support their ambitions and establish next steps.

The School of Innovation and Technology

The School of Innovation and Technology (SIT) at The Glasgow School of Art was formally launched in August 2023 and is a merger between the Innovation School and The School of Simulation and Visualisation. SIT is based at The GSA’s main campus locations in Glasgow and at the GSA’s highland campus in Altyre, Forres.

SIT’s Knowledge Exchange (KE) strategy is based on creating a scalable KE Impact & Innovation Ecosystem and impact-based culture that makes a significant local, national and international difference beyond academia.

Interface

Based regionally throughout Scotland, Interface works with organisations of all sizes and in all sectors, to match them to Scotland’s world-leading academic expertise, to help with their growth ambitions or solve a challenge they may be facing. Our primary aim is to encourage individuals, community groups, businesses & social enterprises in Scotland, to work with a university partner to drive innovation and encourage creativity, turning knowledge and ideas into value for society. With connections into all Scottish universities, colleges and research institutes, Interface has an established and efficient process that will save time and money in identifying and accessing academic expertise, research, technologies, specialist equipment and funding. Our free and impartial service has helped thousands of organisations become more competitive, enabling them to increase their profits, reach new markets and ultimately become more sustainable.

Steve Love

Professor Steve Love is Head of Knowledge Exchange activities in the School of Innovation and Technology at The Glasgow School of Art. His primary research expertise is investigating the impact of digital applications and services on people's behaviour and lives. His work has been sponsored by funders such as the AHRC, EPSRC, ESRC, InnovateUK, Scottish Funding Council, European Space Agency, the European Social Fund, BT, Sharp Laboratories Europe and “3”. He has extensive experience of managing multi-disciplinary teams from both academia and industry. He is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College and a Fellow of the Design Research Society.

Carol-Ann Adams

Carol-Ann worked for 29 years in banking, latterly working in the Corporate Markets division, and attained Chartered Banker status during her career. Having embarked on a lifestyle change, Carol-Ann relocated to the Highlands in 2014, and worked for Highlands and Islands Enterprise’ Inward Investment Team for just under a year. This gave her a fantastic breadth of knowledge of the region in a relatively short space of time. Joining the Interface team in early 2015, Carol-Ann’s role concentrates on promoting the Interface service to as many businesses as possible, encouraging them to enter successful academic collaborations.