Industry
Industry
Working with Industry
N8 has a strong track record of close business partnership to drive translational innovation.
For example, the N8-founded regenerative medicine project, Regener8, has delivered innovation with dozens of SMEs in regenerative medicine and N8 helped establish the Liverpool Open Innovation Hub for Anti-Microbial surfaces as a contact point for business innovation.
The N8 Industry Innovation Forum was established as a broad initiative between the N8 Research Partnership, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Innovate UK – to connect leading businesses with research intensive universities and other key organisations and networks involved in innovation. Innovation Forum events have initiated collaboration discussions, with follow-up programme management support ensuring these flourish into deep collaboration. This pilot programme has shown that facilitated engagement around key business led challenges has the potential to deliver highly relevant new collaborations and to leverage new funding opportunities.
Future Engagement
Subject to funding, we propose to expand our model of working closely with SMEs and with multi-national companies, to support their very different challenges with innovative research collaboration.
N8 aspires to establish Innovation Communities that provide a programme of face to face, online and virtual collaboration initiatives, based within the North but open to national and international businesses; and to run open innovation community – building events to enable new cross-sector research areas to come together in collaboration.
This new Innovation Community approach would ensure N8 Research Partnership plays a central role in embedding academia as a cornerstone of local and national translational research in the North, leading to economic investment and growth.
