Research and Innovation

People

• Ensure we engage more with national Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers
• New Researcher Concordat Committee

Postgraduate Researchers

• University investing £450,000 over 3 years – support series of new PhD studentships

Education & Students

• Ensure research and innovation play a role in transforming student experience
• Recruiting new Entrepreneurship Officer to RI team – support student business start-up advice programme: “Be More Entrepreneurial”

Investment & Impact

• Invested £94,000 of Research England funding on research that addresses policy priorities or enables participatory research

We retained the national Vitae Human Resources Excellence in Research Award and implemented the new Professor and Associate Professor Promotion policy to which 45 staff applied.

We established the Research Institute student intern scheme which we will expand in 2023. The University’s new Sustainability Strategy approved in 2022 is closely linked to our research and innovation and aims to ensure research, teaching and learning activities align with the implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

We are aiming to grow our PhD student community by investing £450k over the next three years in a University match funded studentship scheme with 12 funded PhD students starting in October 2022 and 14 in March 2023.

We invested our Research England income in an internal participatory and policy research funding call that supported twelve projects including locally engaged arts and culture innovation in Luton and research projects that tackled alcohol dependence, homelessness and resilience to natural disasters.

We launched the £1.8m Productivity Escalator programme to pay for academics to work with SMEs and the Time2Grow programme which created 180 graduate placements in business, over 50% of which went on to full time employment with the company. HSBC selected UoB as a new partner to collaborate on our Pathways project because of our top five ranking as a university for creating graduate start-ups every year since 2015.

The Research and Innovation Strategy contains 10 success indicators and the national Knowledge Exchange Framework 2022 results indicate we have already achieved the Investment success indicator which was to ‘Increase our Knowledge Exchange Framework collaborative research ranking to be in the top 50% of universities based on external income generation and co-authored papers with non-academic partners.’ We are grateful to all colleagues who attracted external funding this year and our external income will increase in future as colleagues in the HSS faculty gained a £3m+ grant from the Bedford, Luton and Milton Keynes Integrated Care System and £1m from Health education England.

Our successes rely on the hard work of our staff and PGR students. I wanted to share examples of two success stories. Dr Ioana Stoica is an early career researcher in UBBS, who received investment from the University for her PhD. Keen to apply the knowledge developed in her research, Ioana has undertaken 18 knowledge exchange projects since becoming a member of the academic staff. The University has applied for, and won, over £20m in funding in the last five years to enable staff to work in a measurable way with SMEs. Dr Stoica has used some of this funding to work with a selection of companies including an IT Asset disposal company, a bicycle retailer, logistics companies and even a kitchen designer.  Some of these projects were consultancy, deploying Ioana’s expertise to address a problem the company had identified.  Ioana also designed some of these as “live projects” where her students could engage in real-world tasks and research, and they have been rewarded for these with prizes and placements in the company.  Ioana illustrates the benefits for staff and students of linking up knowledge exchange with research and teaching

Another incredible success story involves Kirstie Baughan one of our PhD students who works as a social worker for Central Bedfordshire Council and has successfully linked research to social work practice. Kirstie was named Social Worker of the Year award by the British Association for Social Work. Kirstie feels that being a research student ‘has helped me to gain important insights into the lives of unaccompanied asylum seeking young people.  Being supported by supervisors who are as dedicated to this area of practice as I am, has been fundamental in the development of my research focus, methods and tools of enquiry. Through the PhD, I want to continue to improve social work practice with unaccompanied young people’.