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Knowledge transfer from academia to industry: The UK Technitex Faraday partnership experience - I

Brian J McCarthy

The textiles industry is a global industry. Across the world, companies are seeking to expand and grow based on product and process innovation. Increasingly, there are demands to ‘get science out of the lab and onto the balance sheet’. This issue is being recognised in all economies. ‘The Indian textile sector has to be technology driven to retain its position as a major player in the global textile trade.

It is apparent that compared with other countries, British business is not research intensive, and its record of investment in R&D in recent years has been unimpressive. UK business research is concentrated in a narrow range of industrial sectors (e.g. pharmaceuticals, biotech, aerospace, etc), and in a small number of large companies (e.g. GlaxoSmithKline, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, BT). All this helps to explain the productivity gap between the UK and other comparable economies. However, there are reasons to be optimistic. Britain’s relatively strong and stable economic performance in recent years will improve the climate for business investment of all kinds. Public spending on science is increasing significantly in real terms, and the UK’s science base remains strong by international standards, whether measured by the quality or the productivity of its output. The UK R&D tax credit provides an important new incentive for business investment.

In addition, there has been a marked culture change in the UK’s universities over the past decade with increasing attention paid to spin-out companies. Most of them are actively seeking to play a broader role in the regional and national economy. The quality of their research in science and technology continues to compare well against most international benchmarks. The UK has 90 universities, 115 institutions and 56 colleges of higher education with a combined income of œ 13.5 billion.

Business is changing too. Growing numbers of science-based companies are developing across the country, often clustered around a university base. New networks are being created to bring business people and academics together, often for the first time. The UK has real strengths in the creative industries, which are also learning to co-operate with university departments of all kinds. However, it is claimed that only 16 per cent of UK businesses engage with the science base.

Faraday partnerships

Faraday Partnerships, a flagship UK government initiative, aimed to encourage businesses to work with the science base. These alliances include businesses, universities, research and technology organisations, professional institutes and trade associations. There are now 24 partnerships involving over 60 university departments, 27 independent research organisations, 25 intermediary organisations and more than 2,000 businesses - large and small. The core activities of the partnerships include the two-way exchange of information between business and universities, collaborative R&D and development projects, technological and dissemination events. Each Faraday receives œ1 million from the UK research councils to establish core research activities in their own field or sector. The Lambert Review concluded that Faraday Partnerships can play a valuable role as an intermediary between business and universities.

A Faraday partnership promotes improved interaction between the UK science, engineering and technology base and industry. They are dedicated to the improvement of the competitiveness of UK Industry through the research, development, transfer and exploitation of new and improved science and technology.

Effective interaction between the academic and industrial communities requires the identification of industry needs and the subsequent synthesis of the knowledge and experience of those who can satisfy these needs. Crucially, each Faraday partnership employs a number of technoogy translators - people with broad experience of knowledge transfer - who can facilitate projects between partnership members. Established Faraday partnerships are widely recognised for their technological expertise and understanding of industry’s needs. Industry therefore benefits from interactions with the relevant Faraday Partnership(s) and participation in their activities when embarking on new product and process development.

Faraday Partnerships aim to:

- Be widely recognised for their technical expertise and be UK industry’s first choice for help with new product and process development.

- Provide better ways of exploiting R&D to create new products and processes, and provide more effective and coherent uptake of the various support mechanisms available (and provide of human and financial resources) eg. TCS, LINK, CASE awards, SMART, International Technology Service, Eureka, European Union Framework Programmes.

- Link many different organisations, each with a part to play in delivering the partnership objectives.

- Deliver the four ‘Faraday Principles’.

The Faraday principles

- Promoting active flows of people, science, industrial technology and innovative business concepts to and from the science and engineering base and industry.

- Promoting the partnership ethic in industrially-relevant research organisations, business and the innovation knowledge base.

- Promoting core research that will underpin business opportunities.

- Promoting business-relevant post-graduate training, leading to life-long learning.

The UK technical textiles sector

The UK technical textiles industry sector and market has always been difficult to define, especially for the purpose of collecting useful and consistent statistics. It is estimated that there are 350 technical textile manufacturers and approximately 750 companies in the supply chain.

Textile fibres, yarns and fabrics are used in a wide range of downstream applications, for example reinforcement, protection, insulation, absorbency, filtration etc.There are continual definitional problems about exactly where the boundaries of the textile industry and its activities lie. For example, the coating of PVC or rubber on to a textile fabric is, by convention, considered to be a textile process whereas the manufacture of a tyre, also involving the bonding of textile reinforcement to rubber, is normally not so regarded. Numerous other ‘grey’ areas exist. Many fabricators and processors of technical textiles (and, indeed, some manufacturers of new-generation textile materials such as non-wovens) are reluctant to recognise themselves as part of ‘the textile industry’ at all.

(Author is director, TechniTex Faraday Partnership, BTTG)

The paper was presented at the recently held International Conference on high performance textiles and apparels, Coimbatore)