Changes to the KTG

This year’s submission was a shadow process to give HEI’s time to adjust to the new reporting requirements. The funding allocation for this year was based on the returns for 2010-11.

Indicative allocations for academic year 2012-13 were set out by SFC in 2011.

Research funding has been concentrated on world leading and internationally excellent research,

Research funding = 3 parts

Research Excellence Grant – 2* research has been removed from the quality profile

Research Postgraduate Grant

Knowledge Transfer Grant – no research rating has been referred to here and the knowledge may not even have to have been created in the submitting HEI.

KTG

General Fund

  • Baseline allocation of £70k to each university
  • Recognising the need for all universities to have dedicated knowledge exchange staff capability to allow for the planning of projects

Horizon Fund

– based on metrics on income and other indicators generated through individual university KE activities

  • Restoration of reduction on research pooling made in 2011-12
  • Removal of any barriers to exploitation of research for economic and wider societal benefit
  • A condition of grant to ensure and “easy access IP” model in place by 2012-13
  • Establishment of a single KE office within the next 2 years
  • Strategic funding
  • Cover commitments against the previous Horizon fund and the Invest to save fund
  • Includes £3m restoration of a previous cut in research pooling (20011-12)
  • Strategic funding budget set at £123 M for 2012-12
  • Detailed project allocations for individual universities will be provided in the final main grant letter in March 2012support for enhanced linkages of academia with industry and support for strategic projects that demonstrably support economic growth
  • SFC will move to more strategic use of KE support, investing in larger scale projects that have the capacity to stimulate sustainable structural changes in linkages between academia and industry rather than funding small scale knowledge exchange projects.
  • Building on success of pooling and experience of the technology innovation centre (TIV) in energy the SFC will over the next 3 years seek to establish a TIC for each of the Government’s other key sectors – creative industries, financial and business services, food and drink, Life sciences and tourism - £10 million for 2012-13
  • SFC prosing to use individual outcome agreements with each university
  • Agreements with associated performance measures will be a condition of grant 2012-13

Main changes to KTG

Each year institutions must return 4 sets of information/data:

  • Strategic KE documents
  • Institutional strategy
  • Annual report
  • Performance against strategy
  • Priorities for next year
  • Approved by at least VP level
  • Information on the use of KTG
  • How the KTG has been spent
  • May require further justification of returned data
  • Statistics for the output from KE activity (mostly what old KTG process asked for)
  • The number of organisations engaged
  • The resultant income from these engagements
  • Narratives describing the impacts of KE activity
  • Impact from and process of KE activities occurring during the previous five years
  • it needs to contain a clear statement (during the assessment period) of the impacts:
  • Reach
  • how widely it was felt
  • Significance
  • How much difference it made to its beneficiaries
  • Need to explain the research that underpins the KE activity
  • This does not necessarily need to be from the same HEI
  • Need to provide evidence to support or verify the claims made
  • The focus should be on KE activity
  • This focus sets narratives apart from REF case studies
  • UHI needs to return at least 3 narratives per year and one of these needs to involve work with one or more SMEs
  • Information on narratives will be placed in the public domain