The Cranfield University Research and Innovation Office

By Deryn Evans

I work within the Research and Innovation Office at Cranfield University (CU). Cranfield is a postgraduate only university, specialising in science, technology and management, teaching over 5,000 students a year. The university was formed in 1946 as the College of Aeronautics and we remain one of the only universities in the world to have its own airport! Structured around eight specialist themes divided into four Schools rather than departments, aerospace, defence and security, energy and power, environment and agrifood, manufacturing, transport systems, and water, we have close relationships with industry within these sectors as well as Government. We have two campuses the main one is based near Cranfield village in the Bedfordshire countryside, in south-east of England and we have a second campus at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire.

The Research and Innovation Office (RIO) at Cranfield University was established in 2015. The office provides an end to end service for researchers across the whole university, to support excellence in research, innovation and impact. This is achieved through our support services to the research community. We lead on the development of research strategy and policy and ensure compliance with research governance requirements to facilitate high-quality academic research, as well as support researchers to access funding and form new collaborations, and manage strategic research relationships and partnerships with public and private sector partners.

The office is an open plan space and the RIO now consists of around 35 members of staff split into four Groups

• Research Excellence: including pre-award research grant support services; researcher development; the Research Excellence Framework (REF); and knowledge exchange funding and Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) support. 
• Research Commercial: including costing and pricing on research grants; tenders; and negotiations and approval of research contracts; due diligence and export control
• Business and Innovation: including industrial research relationship development; strategic partner relationship management; business incubation and acceleration; intellectual property and commercialisation. 
• Ethics and Governance: including research integrity; research governance and ethics; and improving the research student experience through ensuring robust processes are in place for managing research degrees. 

Grants management activities are spread across several of these Groups.

I am a Research Grants Facilitator within the Grants Team, so many of key pre-award activities reside with us. The team members are each aligned with a specific School and also have a topic, such as Fellowships or ODA funding, where they are the subject matter expert and lead for training and advice across the university, and may manage internal funding competitions or pre-selection panels in this area. As a team we provide support throughout the research grant pre-award stage for public sector opportunities (government, EU and Charity) as well as researcher development training to deliver the Researcher Development Strategy. We provide a variety of tangible support services and initiatives some are outlined in the figure below:

 

We work closely with colleagues from other teams to provide our services, and we sit together in the office. The Grants Team sits on a bank of desks in between two of these key Grant Management Teams: the Research Costings and Bid Management Team (RCBMT) and the Knowledge Exchange (KE) Team, so we can share advice and coordinate to provide the best and most streamlined service to our researchers.

The RCBMT provide the financial advice, costings and approvals process for proposals, as well as entering the financial information into application forms. The KE Team provide very similar services to the Grants Team, but for KE opportunities including Innovate UK and the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, so we often work together to determine the best funding route for an idea or follow on funding from a previous grant. We also work together to prepare applicants for interviews.

This core of three teams interact with and coordinate with several others in the office. The Business Development team help ensure researchers and their proposals have strong business partner support, this team also manages our key strategic industrial relationships and funding.

The Ethics and Governance team ensures all work has ethical approval and adheres to research integrity and governance guidance.

The Contracts Team and Intellectual Property and Commercialisation Team often work together to ensure that proposals and awarded grants adhere to terms and conditions, licensing, patents and protection as well as negotiating contracts and agreements between the university and partners.

Our RIO might be small in comparison to other equivalent UK universities, but we have managed to achieve a lot since we were established. We have grown the university’s annual research income from around £32m to over £45 million. We have even won awards for our own work; in 2017 the Research Excellence group, was named ARMAs Research Management Team of the Year, for achievements in the first 18 months of the team’s existence. Now the Grants, RCBMT and KE Teams handle around 450 grant applications every year and the RCBMT manage over 2,000 new bid projects a year.

It not all hard work though, we have a strong community in RIO and do a variety of activities together from crafts, walking around our green campus and even hold our own sports day! We also host various charity fundraising events and get involved to support other university activities such as graduation, student support chat lines and student registration.