A UNIVERSITY VIEW

scaled up and working in everyday environments, and allow our researchers to monitor the buildings’ performance as they are used.

The commercialisation of academic research has often been conceptualised as a linear innovation process. Our Active buildings, which are living labs, exemplify the iterative nature of innovation. Innovation based on academic research requires prototyping, scaling-up and other steps towards commercialisation, and this raises new research challenges which have to be addressed before further progress is possible.

This potentially undermines funding strategies which separate academic research from the funding of innovation. It also presents a challenge to academics who often need to engage constructively in the whole of the innovation process if research is to be commercialised effectively.

Swansea University’s Science and Innovation Bay Campus provided the opportunity to deliver at scale the optimum conditions for academicindustry collaboration in a way that drives fundamental and applied research and innovation commercialisation in the marketplace.

The design of our Bay Campus was informed by two streams of intelligence – a smaller-scale operation developed by our new College of Medicine and the soundings of business

collaborators.

Our College of Medicine is housed in our two Institute of Life Sciences buildings. As well as housing the medical school research and teaching, these provide incubation space for companies that share the laboratory, social and meeting space with academics and students. More than 30 businesses are successfully colocated with our College of Medicine in this space, providing a pilot for our scaling-up of collaborative activity and the embedding of its principles in the design of our Bay Campus.

Soundings from our industrial partners reiterated the value of colocation of business with academics and students, enabling industrial research challenges to be fed back to the academics undertaking fundamental

and applied research. As well as intermingling personnel, we operate pilot lines (facilitating production scale-up) alongside laboratories so we can take research direct from the lab to a manufacturing pilot line and back again, allowing very rapid innovation feedback loops.

What our experiences have shown us is that innovation delivering commercial benefit can emerge from many points along the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs). Funding structures that too neatly seek to separate activity into “academic research” and “innovation” will curtail rather than foster commercial outputs and economic growth.

■ Richard B Davies is Vice-Chancellor and President of Swansea University.