Partner Article

Funding win for uni-business collaborations

A North East based organisation which brings together university and business expertise has won funding to develop a project management tool to help firms and academia work more closely.

Knowledge House hope that the new web-based system will encourage more collaborative projects between businesses and the region’s five universities.

The tool, known as Knowledge House Information Systems (KHIS), will allow both public and private sector organisations working with Knowledge House and the region’s universities to have continual access to projects so that all users are able to contribute and share information.

The funding comes from the Joint Information System Committee’s (JISC) Business and Community Engagement Programme, an initiative to support engagement between education institutions and the wider community.

KHIS is already used successfully within the universities to manage companies, contacts, projects, documents and communications all within one system. However, the current version is not in a suitable configuration for use by external partners and Knowledge House will consequently be developing a ‘vanilla’ version which can be used by external partners as a standalone solution, or as a managed solution with ongoing support.

“Knowledge House provides unrivalled access to the leading expertise within the North East universities and we have been managing collaborative projects for over ten years,” explains Rachel Armstrong, IT Manager at Knowledge House and developer of the tool.

“To date we’ve received over 5,600 enquiries and managed over 1,700 projects and this tool has enabled swift and regular communication between each of the education institutions and ensured that projects are completed effectively and on time.

“Until now only education institutions could benefit, but the new funding will enable us to roll KHIS out to businesses so that they too can contribute to the projects on the system. This will ease the process and facilitate more collaborative projects within the region.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .