Universities offering advice to businesses

22/12/2008

Businesses across the West Midlands are being encouraged to make use of £1.5 million worth of government grants, which provide direct access to high quality academic research and consultancy.

As the credit crunch continues to cause financial problems, Aston Business School in partnership with Warwick Business School and Birmingham University are urging businesses to discover more about over 48 projects, which directly link academic research to current business needs. The schemes, ranging from short seven day academic consultations, through to three-year PhD student placements, are available to businesses over the next five years.

Dr Ben Clegg from Aston Business School believes the funding, from the Economic and Social Research Council will help to drive forward and support the West Midland’s skills economy.
“We’re aiming to engage with small and medium size (SME) organisations operating within the energy, financial services and health technology sectors through our innovative EREBUS (Engaging Research for Business Transformation) project. Our overall aim is to ensure we can bring high quality and relevant advice and research, directly into the workplace, to help public and private sector organisations compete in an ever changing global market place,” said Dr Clegg.
SME’s within the region have opportunity to directly benefit from accessing a variety of resources and support identified through the following four categories:

• CASE awards (each 3 years) – which enable organisations to work with high calibre dedicated PhD students
• Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (each 2-3 years) – which allow top flight graduates to work in organisations on challenging initiatives beneficial to the graduate, organisation and the university
• Placement awards (each for 3 months) – which allows research students to work for organisations for short durations
• A voucher scheme – allowing academics to work on short term (1 or 2 weeks) consulting projects.