SICSA knowledge transfer

SICSA’s mission centres on the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and understanding.

Our mission to outreach encompasses exploitation, public understanding, and informed debate—through projects and initiatives that support engagement with industry and society.

Within SICSA, the primary form of outreach will be in the area of exploitation: promoting informed application of knowledge and understanding, to the benefit of science and society.

Knowledge transfer (KT) activities, co-ordinated by our Business Development Manager, will help provide:

• a structured commercialisation process to pro-actively engage with industry
• advice and support for transfer of technology to industry, including establishing spin-out companies
• programmes and activities, such as  informatics-ventures.com , to encourage understanding, entrepreneurship and resultant company formation
• national and international promotion of SICSA, including public relations, marketing and branding activities.

The intention is to build on best practice across Scotland, including the ProspeKT methodology pioneered in Edinburgh, by having theme-based, market focussed, business development executives (BDEs) located close to researchers. These BDEs will work closely with the existing KT organisations within each institution to add-value to the process by providing a central point of advice and support for possible commercialisation activity, and facilitating researcher access to existing services.

The SICSA KT Board is specifically responsible for identifying KT opportunities and monitoring KT performance. It is designed to be a superset of the ProspeKT Board, drawing on GlobalScot connections.