Up for a challenge? Addressing industry priorities with research-driven solutions
How might we better deliver research-driven solutions to the North East’s industry priorities?
Under the umbrella of Northern Accelerator, the five North East universities (Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland, and Teesside) are promoting new ways of doing research commercialisation. The key questions driving our presence at the Innovation Festival are:
- How can we connect problems that local businesses face with innovative solutions rooted in the science produced in the North East?
- How might we design a demand-led process of co-creating novel solutions as well as licensing opportunities?
Northern Accelerator has partnered with ‘industry problem owners’ in sectors that are important for our regional economy.
At the Innovation Festival, we will facilitate open discussion of several specific real-world challenges. Our tent will be the space to challenge brilliant North East university-based academics and enable all present to co-create ideas that can lead to novel solutions.
The sprints are the first step in the journey aiming for a licensable novel solution. The sprint will produce the initial idea.
That idea includes a refined understanding of the original problem plus an outline of what the solution will look like. By the end of the Festival, the idea will have been stress-tested by all sprint participants and it will integrate the knowledge of our problem owners, academics from various disciplines, and expert facilitators.
Following the Festival, we invite sprint teams to develop their idea into a project proposal. We will assess proposals and provide funding for the most promising projects.
Like all sprints at the Festival, with our industry partners Northern Accelerator will seek to solve hard practical problems in innovative ways. Our approach is unique in that we aim to use the Festival environment to begin the process of co-creating licensable opportunities.
This challenge is available to academic staff from the Northern Accelerator partner Universities (Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Teesside, and Sunderland).
We expect our sprints to appeal to a wide range of academic disciplines and research specialisms.
The Northern Accelerator tent provides a unique opportunity for our industry partners to tap into the region’s best academic brains to solve a real-world problem.
The opportunities for academics include:
- Enriching your sector understanding and enhance your skills via real-world industry challenges
- Shaping innovation as part of the regional research commercialisation ecosystem
- Collaborating with academic peers and industry technical leaders
- Developing a potentially fundable project idea and commercially valuable IP aligned to industry needs and innovation funding priorities
Participants will work in multidisciplinary teams through structured and fast-paced sprints, including:
- Challenge framing and insight sharing
- Problem decomposition and opportunity mapping
- Ideation and concept development
- Rapid prototyping
- Testing and refinement
- Value definition and impact articulation
- Pitching and next-step planning