Principle 5 - Partnership

The University of Strathclyde will interact with managers of business corporations to extend our knowledge of their challenges in meeting social and environmental responsibilities and to explore jointly effective approaches to meeting these challenges.

Strathclyde Business School is committed to working with industry partners to provide bespoke solutions to their business needs and challenges, such as the need to look at sustainability in the hospitality and tourism industry, and, via knowledge exchange, we work on projects with sustainability at their heart.

Working with business to engage together on the social responsibility agenda:

• We have invested in creating an environment which facilitates collaborations between industry and society, research, and taught programmes. We host a number of important membership organisations including Scottish Chambers of Commerce and Entrepreneurial Scotland and we have entered into new strategic partnerships with CBI Scotland, MCR Pathways and Enable Scotland. We have strong links with various networks including our Business Fellows, Strathclyde Network of Founding Entrepreneurs, Enterprise Partners, and have strong relationships with key stakeholders include the Scale Up Institute, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and Be the Business industry group.
• Eight academics from SBS and IPPI participated in a two day workshop with academics from the University of Waterloo’s Institute of Sustainable Energy (WISE) to explore research collaborations in the theme of energy.
• The University of Strathclyde launched a new FinTech Accelerator Programme in March 2019. The programme was announced at the Strathclyde 100 event, a platform for early-stage businesses to pitch their ideas to potential supporters. Entrepreneurs accepted onto the FinTech Accelerator can access the benefits offered by the Rising Stars programme, as well as a suite of support bespoke to the financial sector – an overall package of £10,000 in monetary and in-kind support. FinTech is one of the key sectors Strathclyde is focusing on as we develop the Glasgow City Innovation District partnership. The FinTech Accelerator Programme is anticipated to help cement Scotland’s position as a leader in financial innovation.
• The 26th Oil and Gas survey, conducted by Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the Fraser of Allander Institute was released, revealing that the oil and gas sector continues to show resilience in the face of continued challenges, not least the sustained low oil price.
• The Fraser of Allander Institute (FAI) was successful in securing a number of External Engagement projects from a variety of different clients in July and August. The Fraser’s economic modelling and research skills have been commissioned by institutions including Chevron, the GMB Union, Colleges Scotland, Citizens Advice Scotland and Mainstream Renewable Power Limited (MRP Ltd), with projects due to be delivered over the summer – which are together worth around £50,000. This is in addition to the FAI and Department of Economics’ success in securing two major research grants – from the Office for National Statistics new Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence and the UK Energy Research Centre, projects worth around
  £290k and £215k respectively.
• Grant Allan (Fraser of Allander Institute and Department of Economics) collaborated with colleagues from Imperial College London on a project during 2018. This was to provide technical input and peer review through the United Nations Development Programme to the Vietnam Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment which is developing models to undertake socio-economic impact assessments of Viet Nam’s emission targets.
• The Department of Economics is one of several universities involved in the SUPERGEN Wind Hub, with involvement from Andrew Ross and Grant Allan.
• Scott McGrane is leading research on Global Environmental Measurement and Monitoring (GEMM) with Stanford University, seeking to assess the ways novel environmental monitoring technologies can aid policy and sustainable use of resources within our economy, particularly freshwater.
• A project led by Professor Sarah Dodd (Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Innovation) has included the development and holding of interactive workshops around collaborative growth strategies for the craft beer sector, bringing together craft brewers and relevant academics from nine European countries, together with enterprise support professionals, to analyse and plan for collective, sustainable sector development. These projects include the articulation and enactment of non-economic goals, such as cultural and environmental aims.
• Dr Matthew Hannon (HCE) was invited to peer-review the Energy Technology Institute’s review of ‘10 years of learning at the ETI’. The ETI is UK-wide £400m public-private partnership that has funded low-carbon energy technology innovation to address UK energy and climate change targets since 2007.
• Dr Itamar Megiddo, Dr Abigail Colson, Dr Robert van der Meer, and Prof Alec Morton (Management Science) visited Ghana and met their collaborators at the University of Ghana (UoG), Accra. They also met officials from the Ghana Ministry of Health (MoH) and from the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) and visited two healthcare facilities in Accra. The visit was very successful, and it was the first in a new collaboration with UoG and partnering with MoH and NHIA focusing on delivering hypertension-related services to hard-to-reach communities. Dr Megiddo also organised a session on agent-based modelling of healthcare systems and presented at the African Health Economics & Policy Association Conference, which was held in Accra.
• Alec Morton (Management Science) gave a course “Healthcare Management and Decision” and a talk “Two resource allocation problems in Global Health” at the University of Xiamen Business School and a talk “Making value-based decisions about healthcare: combining evidence and expert knowledge” at the University of Xiamen Medical School.
• As invited speaker, Dr Aliakbar Jafari (Marketing) delivered a talk at the UK Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) in November 2018. Addressing some of the key players in the UK meat industry, Dr Jafari highlighted the economic risks of over-reliance on the EU market. He stressed that successful business operations in contemporary markets - which are increasingly diverse in social, cultural, and ideological orientations - requires firms to embrace the principles of global branding by carefully incorporating the sociocultural values and norms of diverse markets within which they want to operate.
• The Department of Work, Employment and Organisation welcomed Jamilli Medeiros de Oliveira da Silva as visiting researcher during the first term of the 2018-2019 academic year. Jamilli is sponsored by the prestigious São Paulo state academic foundation, FAPESP and is studying the impact of palm oil cultivation in the Amazonian region of African-descendent rural communities in Para state, Brazil.
• Brian Garvey and Kendra Briken (Work, Employment and Organisation) represented Strathclyde at institutional visits to the Brazilian Universities of University of Sao Paulo, The Superior School of Agriculture -ESALQ, and met with peers in the Economics School and Rural Energy department at the State University of Sao Paulo towards an ESRC-FAPESP (Sao Paulo) three year research application. Brian spent one week with the Federal University of Goias and two third sector organisation towards the application of a ‘rural development and employment’ Newton Fund bid.
• Brian Garvey (HRM) with Paul Tuohy from the Engineering School, Mike Danson from Heriot Watt University and Kathryn Burnett of University West of Scotland launched their multidisciplinary tool kit for community renewable energy at the Strathclyde Engage event in May 2018 with more than 40 representatives from industry, third sector and academia and in June at a meeting with trade unions from Brazil and UK (UNISON) in Sao Paulo. The team members of this knowledge exchange project included Kendra Briken and Paul Stewart of SBS.