A fresh pair of eyes and seeing a problem from a different perspective can help an organisation think differently about the challenges they face and how they could arrive at possible solutions.
This is exactly what the Cambridge Grand Challenges (CGC) is set up to do. We aim to connect the best academic minds with corporate partners and the public sector, bringing together foresight of national and global challenges with an in-depth understanding of business challenges. Initially, CGC was developed as an initiative to address global challenges and drive collaboration between academia, industry and government by applying research and methodologies from the social sciences to address the Grand Challenges identified in the Government’s 2018 Industrial Strategy.
It took a few years for the social scientists to see how their expertise and skills could be of value to companies and policymakers and vice versa. As all sides got to better understand each other we’ve been able to build hugely successful partnerships. The CGC has since expanded to cover disciplines across the six Schools of the University and now has a network of more than 60 non-academic partnerships across industry, government and the third sector.
How it works
The CGC initiative supports long-term engagement between industry and academia. It is a bespoke process that can involve student placements, research projects, knowledge exchange, and skills development and research networking to address specific industry needs. There are two main levels of engagement, the first being student placements.
Innovation placements
These placements provide our corporate partners with resource to work on a topic that they might otherwise have had to put on the shelf due to other business priorities or an absence of methodological expertise. They also allow our PhD students to apply their academic expertise to real-world problems facing industry, giving them important expertise and insights that are immensely valuable whether they decide to follow an academic career or seek employment elsewhere.
These placements last between one and three months, can be full-time or part-time and cover a wide range of topics across diverse industries. With Aviva, for example, one of our PhD students used their research knowledge and skills in the area of dementia and ageing to find risk and protective factors for dementia and mortality. The reason for this project was to help inform the underwriting process for insurance products, as well as to support the design of a wellness app intended to help Aviva’s customers lead a healthier lifestyle. Another student’s project with GlaxoSmithKline involved statistical modelling of supply chains in pharmaceutical manufacturing processes and we’ve also had a student who worked with Newsec, a property asset management company, to assess the influence of external factors on the Swedish real estate industry.
We’ve had a few cases where a student placement has led to a company sponsoring a PhD studentship project focussing on longer term industrial needs. Exposure to industry challenges and enabling students to see how their skills can be applied to a non-academic environment has also led to some of our students securing jobs with the company they have worked with during their placement.
Challenge workshops
The second level of engagement is through challenge workshops. These often involve senior academics and post-doctoral researchers from multiple disciplines working together with industry on a challenge and mapping potential solutions to it. During this process, we often find that the company comes away with a greater understanding of its own challenge, having identified a series of collaborative opportunities to work towards finding a solution.
In addition, industry partners gain a wider appreciation of the contribution to innovation made through new ideas, different ways of working and greater interdisciplinarity. Following on from such a workshop, academics have been able to submit research proposals to explore specific challenges and provide solutions for the company. For example, our Grand Challenges workshop with Microsoft Research led to a collaboration between it and the Cyber-Human Lab at the Institute of Manufacturing, looking at human avatars as co-workers and their potential to meet the needs of increasingly collaborative, networked, dynamic, multidisciplinary and geo-distributed workplaces. Currently, academic groups in the University are working with Aviva to explore the impact of climate change on the social, natural and built environment in the UK.
Other benefits to partners
CGC enables personal contacts to form between academics and individuals in companies. These networks bring together people from different disciplines and who come with different perspectives. Establishing these research networks enables a flow of knowledge between the two organisations and can lead to opportunities to leverage funds from funding bodies.
Our student placements have also led to a diffusion of the process across the company with more than one business team engaging with a particular project as it progresses. Through the partnerships that the CGC facilitates, it’s possible to develop tangible and practical insights that a company can then implement, ultimately leading to greater innovation.
Find out more about how CGC can help your organisation here.
Dr Konstantina Stamati
Director, Cambridge Grand Challenges
May 2022
