Optimising & Automating Knowledge Exchange and Commercialisation Data Capture for Universities

Much of the activities that universities undertake and the equipment they own can be used to benefit wider parts of society. To support innovation and learning being spread, universities undertake activities known as knowledge exchange which means interacting with and training businesses, undertaking community projects or working with charities or residents in their local area.

As such, they have a function to support wider society in addition to training students and doing research. Every year the UK government gives money to each university to support this type of activity. Consequently, each university has to produce evidence about these types of things they do to show how it is performing, which determines how much each university is allocated.

Because this type of work is quite new for universities compared to delivering teaching, there is no standardised way of capturing the information, nor hardly any systems or software to do it.

Many have tried to adapt accountancy software or spreadsheets. Staff recording impact using pen and paper isn't unusual. This means that collecting all documentation from different sources is a time-consuming administrative task, and information can get lost if a staff leaves or their computer malfunctions. What we are proposing to build is an online system to automatically capture information, so it's all stored in one place and can be displayed for project managers to see and monitor.

Furthermore, it can be used for more complicated statistical analysis. The information will never get lost, and we can do more useful things with it when it is standardised. Our project intends to do this together with university staff involved in knowledge exchange activities, using workshops to find out what information they would like to collect and then design surveys and systems to do it for them, as well as identify any barriers or problems in their jobs that prevents from making these returns to the government.

This will allow universities a way to capture what they are doing, as well as help them to win more money from the central government each year. Naturally, then, the more funding each institution receives, the better the chances of creating jobs, sharing skills and transferring knowledge from the universities to their local communities become.