Innovation Fellowship - January 2009
Enterprise & Innovation
The Innovation Fellowship is a collaborative scheme in place across all eight East Midland based Universities, it’s funded by emda and allocates funding to early proof of concept stage projects, giving academics the support they need to take their ideas to a fully commercial outcome. The dream would be to unearth the next MRI or DNA finger printing technology, which have both come from the East Midlands, helping to make this region a success.
The scheme has been running for about eight years and during that time they’ve had 497 applications and successfully funded 164 of those, 15 of which have gone on to form companies that have received over £9m worth of investment in the last few years. From these statistics it is clear that the knock on effect of the Innovation Fellowship scheme is not only very positive for jobs, but for the region as a whole.
David Southall, Innovation Fellowship Co-ordinator at The University of Nottingham first approached the Business Champions programme in 2008 looking for commercial input. They needed Champions to be involved in the meetings scheduled to appraise Innovation Fellowship applications. Two Business Champions came forward, Steve Wright, Director of Technical & Marketing Resources and Roy Atkins, Director of Innovia Ltd. David found their verbal contributions to be insightful, “They provided objective opinions and their general advice about how to engage with the private sector was a great help. They provided a good backdrop to our discussions and helped balance academic thinking with industry practicalities”. More recently David has turned to Business Champions in a bid to secure mentors to work alongside some of the successful projects that have been granted funding. Champion Ian Sterritt, Innovation Mentor for Kirkdale Customer Advocates was involved in this pilot scheme, and it’s success has proved that you don’t necessarily have to understand the science behind these projects in order to give a valuable contribution. As a result Champions have been identified as an ideal source for the University as they are able to bring business expertise to the table which can help accelerate these projects to a successful commercial outcome.
David approached Ian Sterritt with a view to working alongside two projects, one of them being headed up by Tony Allen, Manager of the Centre of innovation for technology exploitation. The centre has been set up at Nottingham Trent University as a novel technology transfer unit, it is funded by emda and interacts with business promotes knowledge transfer from Higher Education to business. They have developed a novel voice verification log on system for computer networks. Champion Ian Sterritt identified quite early on that Tony had a very unique capability and that the technology was exceptional. Ian was able to contribute in a number of ways, “I was able to see the potential and started to raise Tony and the rest of the teams gaze to imagine the impossible.” Ian used some of his own business connections to come in and independently verify how this could be applied specifically in a call centre industry.
Tony recognises the huge benefits of working with Ian, “Having a Business Champion on board not only means you have access to his expertise but you’re also able to tap in to their network of contacts”. Ian has experience of managing ICT projects and was able to use that commercial expertise to broaden the concept. For example they are now looking at things like secure call centre log on, biometric credit cards and lots of other areas that would never have been explored had in not been for Ian’s intervention. Ian’s guidance has allowed an independent validation of the concept and through that has given Tony and his business development manager the confidence that they’re on the right track. Tony has found Ian’s help to be invaluable, “to be honest I don’t know where else I would have found somebody that’s been able to provide such a wealth of information”.
Ian is happy with what they’ve been able to achieve so far, “when I first volunteered to help Tony they had already tried to get this technology backed by venture capitalists with limited success. I have given him the confidence to try again and with my help has been successful in achieving investment.”
Looking to the future, Tony is well on his way to securing a spin out from the project and has filed a patent. He comments, “without Business Champions the project would still be moving forward but probably slowly, because what Ian’s done is give it commercial credibility which has accelerated it progress and it brought it to the top of the agenda within the institution. This pilot has shown the importance of using business and academia to commercialise leading edge research in order to boost the regional economy.”