Dear colleagues,
Today I had the pleasure and privilege of attending a ceremony at St James’s Palace where I accepted the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education from His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal. I was proud to do that on behalf of the entire Strathclyde community.
Announced in November last year, this is our second consecutive Queen’s Anniversary Award – as well as being the third of these awards in total – and it was made in recognition of our excellence in Advanced Manufacturing.
The ceremony, and associated reception last night at the Guildhall, were attended by our Chancellor Lord Smith, along with key Advanced Manufacturing academics and researchers along with our industrial partners including Rolls-Royce, UK-CPI, AstraZeneca, Boeing, Pfizer as well as from Scottish Enterprise.
The award reflects both the breadth and scope of our research activity and our impact – supporting manufacturers across the aerospace, automotive, maritime, energy, photonics and pharmaceuticals sectors in the UK and beyond to increase productivity, accelerate innovation, become more sustainable and grow their international competitiveness.
In addition, the award also recognises our impact in terms of ‘place’, through the creation of two vibrant Innovation Districts with Advanced Manufacturing at their core – Glasgow City Innovation District and the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation District Scotland. This is another milestone on the Strathclyde journey and is a testament to the outstanding quality, contributions and leadership of our dedicated and inspiring staff who put innovation and impact at the heart of our mission, truly making Strathclyde ‘a place of useful learning’.
‘Transformative innovation and impact’ is one of our key strategic goals and is why we created the Strathclyde Innovation Forum – to encourage all University colleagues to share their innovative ideas to make our work more effective, our jobs more enjoyable and, ultimately, our University more successful.
The Forum provides support for colleagues to innovate within their teams as well as periodically calling for ‘all staff’ ideas on a Grand Challenge – a challenge or issue facing the University which staff innovation can help to solve. So far, we have asked for your ideas on three Grand challenges and you can find out more about the impact of your ideas here.
We now wish your input into the development of our Digital Strategy and how we might use technology to deliver a sustained and strategic change to the way the University operates. Our Digital Strategy will not be driven by available technology but by our people and our strategic vision for 2025 and beyond. We welcome your ideas on what we might achieve using technology, rather than about specific tools or software packages. You may want to consider how we can make existing processes more efficient, use data more effectively or deliver services in different ways.
For more information, and to submit your ideas, please visit the Strathclyde Innovation Forum website.
At this week’s Leadership Group meeting on Tuesday we discussed the topic of Tackling Unacceptable Behaviours. As a values-driven University, the way we behave towards one another is of great importance.
While there has been much attention on tackling serious instances of misconduct, we need to remember that more casual or everyday transgressions of the standards applicable to our community cannot be tolerated either. They prevent us from being the inclusive community we aspire to be.
At Leadership Group we reflected on these matters and I asked the group to think about what they should do when confronted by casual transgressions. Our discussions reflected on our own individual behaviour and that of the teams that we are part of. This is an important exercise and I have encouraged all members of the Leadership Group to discuss this with colleagues in Faculties, Departments, Schools and in Professional Services.
Finally, this week, with the Winter Olympics well underway in Beijing, I am pleased to see that Grant Hardie, a Civil and Environmental Engineering alumnus and member of the GB men’s curling team, has been enjoying success on the ice. The team have qualified for the semi-finals of the men’s competition with two games to spare, after victories over Italy, Norway, China, Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden. I wish Grant and the team the best of luck in their semi-final taking place today.
I thank you for your continued support and contributions to our activities and wish you an enjoyable weekend ahead.
Best wishes,
Jim