At a time when economic growth and productivity are critical to the UK’s future, the ability to turn brilliant ideas into commercial successes is more important than ever. And in a complex world, giving businesses, from manufacturers to AI innovators, access to the expertise they need can be transformational.
This is where Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) come in, matching companies with universities to the benefit of both partners. Businesses gain access to the knowledge and technical insight they need to drive innovation and academics get the chance to apply their research to real world problems.
Now marking 50 years of bridging the gap between research and industry, KTPs offer businesses a practical route to help develop new products, services, income streams and software solutions. Their impact is clear – contributing more than £2bn to the UK economy in the decade leading up to 2020.
As organisations continue to look for effective ways to drive growth and stay competitive, KTPs are emerging as a key part of the conversation. In the King’s Speech last year, the government described securing economic growth as a fundamental mission – and key to this is productivity growth, a major focus for KTPs.
Funded jointly by the individual business or organisation and the government’s Innovate UK, KTPs involve, quite literally, a transfer of knowledge, technology and skills. They give companies access to the expertise and technical insight they need to innovate and offer universities the chance to apply their research to real world problems.
Today, more than 800 businesses are involved in KTPs with about 100 academic institutions. Partnerships recruit graduates or postgrads to link the two worlds giving the “associates” the opportunity to work in a business setting, contribute to innovation and develop their skills further.
Sheffield Hallam University first worked on a KTP in 1985, and has since partnered with more than 150 companies on 210 projects. Initially focused on manufacturing and engineering, KTPs within the university have evolved in recent years.
“Sheffield was an industrial city in the 1980s so the first 20 or 30 years were very much focused around traditional manufacturing industries, adoption of new technology and testing of materials,” says Prof Conor Moss, executive dean for the college of business, technology and engineering and university lead for research. “More recently we’ve been working on projects that tackle sustainability issues and advanced technologies incorporating AI and machine learning, for example.”
One such project is the university’s partnership with the heat recovery specialists Dext Heat Recovery. The initiative came from one idea: could heat waste from commercial kitchens be recycled in a way that would reduce energy, costs and a kitchen’s impact on the environment? The team of engineers behind Dext, based in Sheffield and Lancashire, needed a technical partner to explore what was feasible (enter: Sheffield Hallam).
The Dext Heat and Sheffield Hallam project team’s solution was to develop and optimise a “heat recovery plate” that could be installed close to cookers and chargrills to absorb waste heat and use it to provide hot water for the kitchen. The technology has since been successfully installed in restaurants across the UK, including at household names such as Nando’s, reducing commercial kitchens’ impact on the environment as well as operational costs.
“KTPs work so well because they give businesses access to the academic excellence of a university,” says Moss. Projects very much vary depending on each business’s needs, he says. “Companies typically come to the university with a business challenge, but might also be wanting more data, or to test a new product or idea, for example. If they have developed a prototype to a certain level, they might need an additional knowledge base or capacity to take that idea into a market-ready product.”
Gripple, a Sheffield-based engineering firm set up in 1989 is the recipient of five Queen’s Awards for Enterprise and has a longstanding relationship with the university. The business came about thanks to the success of its very first invention – a simple way of connecting wire fences together (AKA the “Gripple fastener”). Sheffield Hallam helped develop the product, turning it into something that could be sold globally and manufactured quickly in high volumes. Now, the brand is global, employing more than 950 people across 18 locations worldwide.
The success of the project led to other joint ventures between Gripple and Sheffield Hallam, from one with Design Futures, the university’s industrial design group, to another helping develop a spin-out company, Loadhog Ltd, and its supply chain packaging products. The strength of the relationship means that Gripple now sponsors the university’s annual Enterprise Challenge business-startup competition.
It also collaborated with the university, along with another local business and Sheffield city council, to launch a series of innovation workshops aimed at encouraging more local companies to think about how they too can break new ground.
“Examples like this show why UK universities underpin the country’s productivity and economic growth and why we need to encourage this type of sustainable investment,” says Moss. “KTPs have been a real success over the last 50 years. If we want to get the UK economy growing, we need to be doing more of this’
Having access to experts in their field is a compelling prospect for businesses small and large, adds Moss. “In the case of one of our more recent KTPs – with Guildhawk, a global leader in technology that creates multilingual communications – they’ve been working with a professor of machine intelligence and an associate with a strong background in data science and AI.”
Jurga Žilinskienė, CEO of Guildhawk, says: “Our partnership started in 2018 and has now created GAI Translate, which just won the Market Disruptor of the Year Award 2025. We see it as a gamechanger. With Sheffield Hallam, we are showing how partnerships can make Britain the global leader in ethical AI. From day one, our joint focus has been on turning R&D into real world products that improve lives.”
The KTP with Guildhawk explores how to embed AI and natural language processing techniques into machine translations (training computer-generated language to sound more human and lifelike). “A lot of that involves how you label information using AI,” says Moss. “So we’ve gone as a university from quite an industrial capacity to heavily computational uses. It begs the question, how do businesses, particularly SMEs, leverage opportunities from AI going forward – and they’ll need support in doing that.”
KTPs can be the start of a long and fruitful relationship that benefits not just the businesses and the university directly, but the wider community and economy too, says Moss. “Our work with Guildhawk began with a KTP and then as the business grew, they worked with us to identify computer science talent they could employ to support that growth. Later, we brought them back in as part of an advisory board to help us redesign our programmes too. So while yes, KTPs are a thing in themselves, they’re very often the beginning of something quite special.”
Learn more about knowledge transfer partnerships with Sheffield Hallam
