The University has been allocated £750K by ESRC to support knowledge exchange activities with non-academic partners over the next 45 months.
The ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) is intended to create impact beyond the academic world by exploiting social sciences research (whoever it was funded by as long as it falls under the ESRC remit) to shift perceptions and understanding of important issues of the day, and to influence policy and practice.
It will fund:
• secondments and projects to build relationships with the public sector, civil society, business and social enterprise/3rd sector partners;
• targeted events and briefings to focus on major public policy issues or engage with selected strategic partners in all the above sectors;
• a series of development workshops for those researchers, particularly ECRs, wanting to enhance the non-academic public, social and economic impact of their research. The first calls for applications to fund secondments and relationship-building projects will be issued in September to coincide with a formal launch of the scheme. The staff development workshops and external engagement events and briefings will start in Q1/2015.
Plans for these latter activities are currently being formulated and we welcome suggestions for:
•Strategic (non-academic) partners to involve in a programme of expert briefings from our academic community;
• Topics to cover at Personal Development workshops; perhaps ‘How to effectively engage with business’ or ‘Social enterprise’ for example.
Future communications will provide more detailed information about the IAA activities and application process for funding. For enquiries please contact Katie Eason ([email protected]) or Ian Rowley ([email protected])