Smaller and specialist universities miss out on vital flexible and sustainable funding to forge and nurture partnerships with local and global businesses, communities, councils, charities and the general public. Today, GuildHE has launched a new report, Expertise in Action: the real-world impact of knowledge exchange funding at smaller and specialist institutions, which tackles the imbalances in the funding system that reward size. It also evidences the impact made by smaller, specialist and practice-based institutions who received short-term single-year knowledge exchange grants released by Research England in 2021 and 2022.
For universities that do not receive flexible funding, the Higher Education Investment Fund (HEIF) received a grant of around £200,000 in 2021 to use on knowledge exchange partnerships as part of UKRI’s interventions to build back better in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. This was a welcome recognition of the importance of this activity for economic growth in this country, including at providers that did not return over the threshold for HEIF funding. This grant was repeated in 2022 at just below the same figure. Despite the challenges with short-term, stop-start funding, we took this as an opportunity to ensure we measured how institutions managed and invested this funding, and what impact it made on their connections with business, on their communities, places and project outcomes.
GuildHE commissioned independent researcher James Ransom to evidence and evaluate both the projects that institutions funded with these grants and the effect it had on the governance and management of KE internally. This evidence is presented through 10 case studies as well as a simple model of the stages these providers went through to strategise, operationalise and administer their projects, and where the barriers lie.
