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KTP for Business

Innovation is the beating heart of progressive, successful growth orientated organisations. Progressive businesses want to innovate – to design new or enhanced products, services, systems or processes – to boost performance and competitiveness. It’s not uncommon however that businesses lack a specific type or depth of expertise in a particular area to deliver on key projects. That is where a KTP comes in.

  • KTPs provide progressive businesses with:
    • exceptional access to expertise and facilities within our universities
    • a mechanism to apply deep knowledge and fresh thinking to their innovation challenges
    • a means to embed know-HOW in their organisations resulting in a step-change in capability

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) – the nuts and bolts

  • A KTP is part grant funded collaboration involving three partners - a business, a university and an able graduate or postgraduate – that lasts typically for 2-3 years.
  • KTP provides a project management framework that cements the unique relationship enabling the partnership to deliver powerful outcomes.
  • Here's how the fundamentals work:
    • The business brings a challenging development opportunity ‘to the table’ for which it lacks vital expertise inhouse to fully exploit.
    • The university provides academics with the relevant expertise to facilitate a solution.
    • Once a business-university match has been made and the KTP project approved, one or more able graduates are recruited to undertake a challenging workplan, under company and academic tutelage and supervision, to deliver the planned outcomes, and importantly, embed the new ‘know-how’ in the business.

Embedding new capabilities within businesses is central to what KTP does

Business Scenarios ripe for KTP

Organisations of many types, sizes and different stages of maturity engage in KTP to grow their businesses or make them more effective and efficient:

  • Established businesses, large and small, that want to enhance products or processes by incorporating new technologies or employing new techniques.
  • Companies who have a vision for a new product, process or service using cutting edge approaches, emerging technologies or methods.
  • Early stage companies with committed backers who need access to specialist expertise and laboratories to validate their ideas and implement techniques to bring them to market.
  • Public sector organisations with ambition to serve their communities better by improving systems, processes, and management capabilities.

What business leaders say about their KTP experience

KTP was a huge helping hand in getting us to where we are today . We’re now working with some of the biggest companies globally to implement our solution into their products
Claus Marquordt - Co-Founder & CEO, Integrated Graphene Ltd

KTP is a must for any business that wants to better themselves, wants to be more successful, and if innovation is in their thoughts KTP has to be their first choice. It’s been instrumental in most of the success we’ve had over the last 20 years
Martin McHugh - Chairman, Martec Engineering Ltd

We needed to develop the capability to deliver complicated three year progressive safety studies that proved to the industry regulators and customers that our new technology for the treatment of sea lice in salmon was safe for the fish and for the marine environment. KTP was the perfect mechanism to deliver that and we succeeded.
Ian Armstrong - Founder & M-D, Pulcea Ltd

Why do companies get involved in KTP?

There was no off-the-shelf solution to move us from point A to point B, so we knew we needed substantial help to figure this out

We realised we needed some deep know-how to develop and bring in a new process without the whole system falling down

With soaring international transport costs we needed to analyse every aspect of our quite complex shipping processes and find a solution to radically reduce costs

With changes in environmental legislation we needed to find a new sustainable way to clean the titanium alloy material and we didn’t have the expertise to do that ourselves

We needed fresh thinking to dissect the process, pin down the root cause and fully deliver a lasting fix

Ian Armstrong, Founder & M-D, Pulcea Ltd

KTP Academic Partner – Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling

Martin McHugh, Chairman, Martec Engineering Ltd

KTP Academic Partner – Edinburgh School of Architecture, University of Edinburgh

Claus Marquordt, Co-Founder & CEO, Integrated Graphene Ltd

KTP Academic Partner – School of Chemistry, St Andrew’s University