What does enterprise and innovation mean in business?
Innovation within business means generating new ideas for products and services. It can also mean changing your business model or adapting existing products and services to deliver better quality for your customers. Innovation means thinking of creative solutions, so that your business can remain competitive and sustain business growth. It’s vital that a business innovates to maintain a healthy future.
For businesses with new products or services, where do they start?
There are various stages in moving an idea from concept to commercialisation. Once you have an initial idea, you will need to start researching to see whether it has scope. A university research team can help with a variety of research activities – from market assessment to product testing. They can bring together their academic research expertise and provide consultation on a number of areas, including funding and intellectual property.
How do businesses protect their ideas from competitors?
Once you have an idea, you’ll need to meet with an intellectual protection (IP) officer to see whether or not the idea needs protecting. The IP officer will guide you through the process of how you go about assigning a patent in order to protect your design. A patent gives businesses protection from others making, using or selling their idea.
And how does Coventry University help with this?
The Enterprise & Innovation Group at Coventry University helps all kinds of businesses – from startups to blue chip companies – commercialise their ideas. We link businesses with specialist expertise from our university faculties. With world-leading academics and researchers across so many subjects, we’re well placed to add cutting-edge thinking into an organisation’s ideas.
As well as academic expertise, we have an experienced team of professionals who project manage all of our commercialisation projects from inception to completion. Our partnership coordinators work closely with our partners to ensure that we focus on their needs all the way through a project.
Funding is one of the key issues for new products or services, so our team of proposal development consultants help our partners to source funding for a project and to write bids and proposals.
Can you tell us about some of the projects that you’ve worked on?
A wide range of projects, including lifesaving initiatives. Helen Maddock, principal lecturer in the physiology and pharmacology department, has discovered a new, viable way of testing drugs. Within the drug testing phase, there may be life threatening side effects. But Coventry University research has found that by using human heart tissue during the drug testing phase, pharmaceutical companies can safely test a drug before it goes to market, which ultimately minimises the risk to patients. This is now a new model being used in drugs testing processes – it really is a life changing project.
Microcab – a company created at Coventry University – are leading the way in providing an innovative solution to urban air pollution, by creating hydrogen fuel celled vehicles. During the project, various sectors have provided their expertise at different stages and the Enterprise and Innovation Group have pulled all of this research and expertise together.
Who looks after these projects?
Our team is made up of people with different commercial specialisms, all managed by a central project delivery team. When we work with our partners, they have a dedicated relationship management team to act as one single point of contact.
We have an agile approach to project management – we set deadlines and KPIs and our partnership coordinators and administrators make sure it all runs smoothly. Our specialists come from a variety of different sectors and have expertise in funding, intellectual property, and research and development, to name a few.
What characteristics do you need to work in the team?
You need to be energetic, commercially-focused and organised. It’s a busy, hands-on environment where no two days are the same and every project throws up new challenges and opportunities.
Working in any kind of client-facing role is good experience for being part of the Enterprise and Innovation Group team – because our partners are central to everything we do, we need to develop really strong, effective relationships and good communication is key. Attention to detail and project management skills are a prerequisite – when we’re handling such fast-moving projects, it’s important to be on top of everything that’s going on.
How much do you think you’re going to grow in the next few years?
Coventry University is currently growing at a phenomenal rate. We now have campuses in Coventry, London and Scarborough. We have over 3,000 people working for the university group and we’re looking for other dynamic and ambitious candidates to join the team. We’re going to continue growing and with our recent accolades of Modern University of the Year 2015 (The Times and Sunday Times) and being positioned 15th in the Guardian university league tables, it’s an exciting time for Coventry University. We plan on achieving more and going further, and there’s no doubt we’re going to continue growing.
What next for Coventry University and their partners?
We’re growing. And we’re expecting to continue to develop our partnerships and the industries we’re working with. The university is going from strength to strength, and we’re working on some key areas of research impact such as climate change, technology-enabled health and low impact buildings that will continue to underpin the expertise we bring to our partners.
As our reputation for world-leading specialist research continues, we’re expecting to work with even more diverse partners and be involved in further life-changing projects. Enterprise and innovation infuses everything that the university does, so to be at the heart of the group that can help drive it is pretty exciting.
Paul Fairburn is director of Enterprise & Innovation, Coventry University.
Content on this page is paid for and provided by Coventry University Enterprise & Innovation Group.
