Could a KTP help your business?
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Does your business have a challenge it needs to address? Do you have a strategic project you want to get off the ground, but don’t have the time or resources? Well, Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) has the answer for you.
It has been supporting innovative and collaborative thinking for the past 47 years by bringing together business ideas and academic expertise.
Funded by Innovate UK, KTP supports forward-thinking businesses to work with world class academic teams and bring in a talented graduate - known as a KTP Associate – to develop and deliver a transformational project to help realise the company’s growth ambitions.
And the best part? Your risks are reduced enormously, as you get help with the financing of the whole thing. Innovate UK will fund 67 per cent of the programme for small businesses and cover half the costs for bigger businesses.
North of Scotland KTP centre manager Kelly Fraser said: “We work with the business throughout the whole lifecycle of the project. We help them to scope out the project based on their strategic needs and knowledge gap, drafting and submitting the funding application, and provide project administration support for the duration of the KTP.”
The projects can run from 12 months to 36 months, with additional support from a Knowledge Transfer Adviser who will ensure that the programme stays on track and reaches a successful conclusion.
“KTP is a collaborative model supporting a business that has a strategic need or challenge that they can't address on their own”, explained Kelly.
“They may not have the appropriate expertise or knowledge, which prevents them from achieving their commercial goals – the KTP model helps with this by transferring knowledge from the academic partner, through the work of the KTP Associate, to the company teams to support long-term, sustainable growth.”
“The benefits to businesses are that they are getting a full-time Associate, access to academic expertise and state of the art facilities."
“Additionally, they get to build a relationship with the academic institution - we often see collaboration taking place after the project, and more times than not the Associate is recruited by the company after the KTP project ends.”
Kelly added: “We make sure that the business gets the right Associate that fits with their team. This may be a graduate with an honours degree, a Master's degree or a PhD, depending on the nature of the project. It's a great opportunity to attract talented people to the region, or ensure that local graduates have an opportunity to stay in the north of Scotland.”
Windswept Brewing
Windswept Brewing in Moray has been benefitting from a KTP by working with the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI), and its partners UHI Moray, the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) and the Institute for Northern Studies (INS). The aim of this particular KTP has been to provide Windswept with the knowledge and expertise to identify, select and deploy sustainable energy and waste management innovation while reducing energy usage and waste at the brewery, ultimately improving its environmental impact and economic sustainability.
Windswept managing director, Nigel Tiddy, spoke about how the KTP has revolutionised the brewery’s way of doing business: “There's a lot of technology out there to improve sustainability. What really interests us here at the moment is how we can use new technology, but on a site which isn’t ours, which has limited space. How do we do that? What innovation can we bring in?
“I think that that whole idea of having a multi-disciplinary approach with a team that you can draw on from the academic side of things has really given us a much broader approach to this, and the ability to attack the problem from lots of different directions with some great expertise and support from the UHI team.
“Working with the North of Scotland KTP Centre team has been a pleasure and bit of a revelation really. I've done several projects which have been funded externally and one of the biggest issues with all of them is the application process, which is quite often long and complicated. The KTP process is no less long and complicated but the help you provide is fantastic. I can't speak highly enough of the team - they've made what could have been an exceptionally complicated process relatively straightforward for us as a business.
Samantha Scott, deputy head of Academic Partnerships at UHI Moray spoke about how the collaboration has been helpful for every member of the partnership: “Windswept were aware that their energy usage and wastewater production in the brewery process were very high.
“Sustainability has always been a key focus for Windswept, and through the KTP project they have access to academic expertise and knowledge to allow them to explore and deploy energy, sustainability and wastewater management innovation within the brewery.
“It's been a much larger scale project that has allowed us to employ our KTP Associate, Chizaram, to work in the business full-time for a longer period of time of two years.”
So if you want to be involved and have a success story like Windswept’s, then all you need to have are the following drivers:
∙ A company challenge that needs additional input to solve it
∙ An interest in harnessing innovation to drive your company forward
∙ A commitment to partnership working, collaboration and growing talent
For more information, just get in touch with Kelly and her team at the North of Scotland KTP Centre.
