Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF)

Neelam Raina: Hello and welcome to Middlesex University research podcast.

My name is Neelam Raina, and I am the Director of Research at Middlesex University. At Middlesex University, we do many different types of research that has widespread impact on our students, on our academics, and the wider community outside. The ambition of our research is to transform lives, and we do that in many different ways. 

These podcasts are recordings done at Middlesex University by colleagues here, who will talk about their research, their ideas, why do we do research, how does it matter, and all kinds of issues in-between. So welcome to Middlesex University research podcasts. Thank you for joining us. 

Today we have Dr. Mark Gray here with us. He is the Director of Knowledge Exchange and Knowledge Transfer at Middlesex University, and he will introduce himself. My name is Neelam Raina. I am the Director of Research and running these podcast series that enable us to talk to you about our research and to have our research picked up outside the university. 

So, hello and welcome. Mark, would you like to introduce yourself?

Mark Gray: Thank you Neelam. I am, as you say, Director of Knowledge Exchange at the university. I have been involved in knowledge exchange for nearly 40 years, both as someone actively engaged in knowledge exchange and as someone helping to facilitate the process of developing knowledge exchange. 

I have done that in a number of different university settings, both in the UK and overseas. I am hugely interested in knowledge exchange. It is, for me, one of the most exciting things we do in universities.

Neelam Raina: Thank you. And can you tell us what your background is? I know you are an economist. Could you tell us a little bit more about your entry into this space? 

Mark Gray: Yes, I am an economist - don't hold that against me. I'm an economist who has always had an interest in the way in which economics can change society. So, how can insights from economics be made useful in the context of everyday life as much as anything else? My first entry into this was through a piece of contract research with a colleague at a university many years ago, back in the 1980s. 

I think the thing that struck me first, was that knowledge exchange provided me with an opportunity to encounter problems and people I might not have encountered through research alone. In much the same way that the research agenda on impact has been about encouraging people to reach beyond the walls of the university to seek impact - knowledge exchange is a route to doing it. 

It's a very effective way of making sure that the research you do reaches constituents and affects people outside of the university. My first experience was doing some consultancy work for a foreign government and exposing myself to issues that simply would not have come up in the context of any of the economics I was doing. 

So for me, it's genuinely transformational.

Neelam Raina: It absolutely is. I remember being part of that generation when knowledge exchange used to be called knowledge transfer, which had too many negative connotations around the world, and now it has moved to knowledge exchange. Universities are generators and holders of knowledge, so spaces where we produce information and knowledge that is of interest and use to us, but we hope it is also of use to the wider community. 

So I'm going to jump straight in and ask you the first question. What is knowledge exchange? The sub-question is: how does research fit into knowledge exchange as a concept? 

I know we've had several discussions in the corridor about this, but it will be nice to hear your take on how you define knowledge exchange and how you see research being part of that process of creating, generating, and exchanging knowledge. 

Mark Gray: I think, for me, knowledge exchange is genuinely exploratory. It's about finding ways in which what we know - not just research knowledge, but also our field knowledge or know-how in a particular area - can reach beyond the walls of the university to have a real effect externally. To address your question directly: what is knowledge exchange? 

It's actually defined, unbelievably, in an act of parliament. The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 says that knowledge exchange is a process. It's a very important part of this. It's something you intend to do, something you drive - a process of engaging with communities outside of the university, so it has to be external, or at least the beneficiaries must be external, to achieve a change in the economy, society, or culture externally. There are three important parts to that.

Firstly, it has to be intended. You have to plan for it. Knowledge exchange is something we drive - it isn't accidental. It shouldn't be something where luck enters the game. We are intending to be creative with the knowledge and know-how that we have.

Secondly, that we have identified, know of and are actually talking to those communities of people outside who might benefit from what we do and what we know. 

Thirdly, there is a measurable change. There is something we add as a consequence of sharing our knowledge or know-how which makes a material difference. It really does change lives externally. And that doesn't have to mean in purely economic terms, it can be in terms of understanding, comprehension, engagement, it could be in all kinds of different domains.

But those three elements have to be there for me for knowledge exchange. It has to be intentional. We have to know who we are trying to reach and be in conversation with them. We need to generate a real benefit. 

So for me, that's what knowledge exchange is.

Neelam Raina: Very often in research that I have done myself, knowledge exchange emerges as a space of a methodology where we are actively working with communities who know a lot more about their environments, their challenges, their solutions, and are willing to collaborate as part of a research project to develop this further. 

Then we look at impact, where we look at developing co-producing knowledge that is of value to our community – and the community will then cascade it horizontally and share wider and further. So, in my head, I see knowledge exchange as a vital part of co-designed research projects, where the intent to create impact drives the manipulation of knowledge as an exchange situation. 

Very often, we go in with preconceived ideas. We come across solutions, we come across multiple challenges, and then we develop something that is more sustainable, more locally owned, and therefore more valuable, with lasting impact and sustained relevance of the knowledge produced 

So how do we, as a community of academics, indicate our intent for knowledge exchange? How do we communicate that further?

Mark Gray: Intent is a really important part of knowledge exchange.

It means that as we conduct our research or as we find ways of developing our know-how, our capacity, our underlying knowledge of the field, we are thinking about exactly who those communities might be that we interact with and how we might interact with them. Most importantly, if we don't know, we engage in conversations to find out - this is a really important part of knowledge exchange. It isn’t called Knowledge Exchange for nothing – there is meant to be something coming back the other way. 

So dialogue is really important in shaping the knowledge you exchange. For me, the framing of that conversation has to be driven by universities. We have to engage with it. It does make our research better.

Let me share an example from my experience as an economist. I think the point at which I first woke up to this was when I was doing some work for the World Bank many years ago, and working with a group of other economists in an economy that was undergoing really significant trauma beyond anything that one would experience in a normal economy, a normal macroeconomy suffering from an external shock. 

I remember sitting in a restaurant with a bunch of other economists and we were facing the impossible challenge of adapting to this, and a French colleague said to us, is that it? Do we now give up? Do we now say the economics that we come with no longer works? We all pack up and go home? No, he said, we have to find a way of interacting with the situation because that's what professional researchers do. That made a deep impression on me, because I think what he was essentially saying was that your subject learns from the context in which it is applied, and being open to learn in that context is part of taking control. 

So when I say that there needs to be intent, I think intent needs to be something that's understood in the context of our always learning about how we might translate what we know to different contexts. You have to be open to that.

Neelam Raina: If I was listening, as many of our listeners will be, if I was listening as a non-university member of society, for example, I'm the director of a very small company that is exploring X, whatever it might be. How do I understand knowledge exchange and how do I approach the university, because universities are huge institutions that do multiple things simultaneously.

What is the entry point of somebody who's interested in this conversation to approach the university? How do we get in touch? What are we looking for? What are the options available to us to even engage with a university? Could you tell us more about the mechanics of it?

Mark Gray: Yes, but before I get to that, let me just say that I recognise absolutely the salience of that question because in survey, after survey, after survey, when you ask businesses externally or you ask public sector organisations where we ask community groups, what do you think about knowledge exchange from universities? The normal response is what is knowledge exchange? What do universities offer? So, I think I'd start by saying that one of the things we have to do as a sector is explain better what's available from universities. 

So let me offer a sort of prospectus. There are all sorts of things that you can get from your local university that are entirely free. And these form a bedrock for the relationship between external organisations and the university. For example, the majority of research coming out of a university should now be available by open access. Certainly, data from university researchers, which might be useful in the context of your business or in your social enterprise, will be publicly available, and should be available too.

Universities will also have opportunities for you to interact with research. For example, there will be seminars and lectures and so on. 

Now those things, although they don’t in the official definition of knowledge exchange used by government find a place, they are a very important part of the architecture of knowledge exchange because there are resources in our universities that are paid for publicly. They are therefore available publicly. There’s a part of that ongoing dialogue between organisations externally, and the universities themselves. So that's the first thing to say.

What else can you get from universities? Well, there’s a whole raft of things. You can engage with universities to answer that difficult question that’s holding your company back. 

There are a variety of schemes which will fund this. For example, the knowledge transfer partnership will enable your company to work with a university to identify solutions to a problem that’s holding back the growth of your company for example.

So, there are funded routes to engaging through, what universities call, contract research or collaborative research. The mechanism by which we use the potential of universities as research organisations - to answer questions which are out there, and to use our knowledge and know-how to help. That's the first route. 

The second is that we can help directly with those thorny problems where you don't need research, you just need somebody who really knows a lot to help crack the question. Kind of consulting questions, questions which in other contexts you might go to a professional consulting business about. There may not be professional consulting businesses in some of your areas, but there will almost certainly be researchers. And the researchers can help answer those questions through consultancy. 

Then there's training and professional development. Universities can help there by providing not just the latest skills, but they can help you anticipate future skills. So it's not just framing the professional development needed now or helping address skills gaps now. It's doing something more than that. It's looking at what your organisation will need as a skills base in the years to come, and that on the basis of both our research knowledge in universities and our understanding of the environment in which that knowledge is applied. That can be really helpful for businesses as well. 

Then we've got a lot of intellectual capital sitting around in universities in the form of intellectual property of one kind or another, patents, image rights, and all sorts of different things. Those may be available to companies and other organisations. So all sorts of resources that are in universities, and in almost any other context, if you were thinking about where do I source support for my problem, you'd probably turn to a consulting company or look at another company's intellectual property.

Just remember that universities, as a hugely important public resource, have a lot of that too. And the next question, which you may get to, is how then do you identify it? And that's the difficult bit where I said right at the outset, it has to be intentional. We have to intend to find communities - that really is up to us. I think universities have to find those people who are going to benefit from the knowledge and know-how that we have.

Neelam Raina: It sounds like we are like a knowledge resource partner buddy who is willing to walk alongside different industries on their journey of growth whilst they are growing in the direction they wish to grow in. 

And also help them, in many ways, scope out the landscape and the horizon, and what’s coming to them, with them, and either plug support that we already have, or build research that will allow that support to be plugged in the future. In many ways, that kind of leads to a question about engagement. 

There is engagement that is built into research where you have to engage with communities that are working with you, thinking like you, or who could benefit from your work. In many ways, knowledge exchange sounds like its engagement driven. Is it?

Mark Gray: Engagement is certainly a part of it, and I think increasingly the idea that knowledge exchange is something separate from engagement, is beginning to be tested. 

In terms of the official definition - the definition applied by Research England to knowledge exchange - public and community engagement is certainly expected to be part of that. However, for many universities, it is often seen as an add-on. For me, it isn't an add-on; it's part of a continuum. 

So our engagement with organisations outside of the university includes sharing what we know informally. It includes our contributing to the public conversation. So to give one example, we do lots of excellent research in Middlesex University on really challenging areas in the social sciences. 

Let me take an example from the sciences. We do work on deep brain stimulation involving implantation devices. Now, this is for many people, quite uncomfortable territory when you start talking about the extent to which implantation devices can be used in different contexts. 

For example, there are implantation devices of the type that I have. I use a cochlear implant that's an implantation device. It's in the brain. But there are other implantation devices that go beyond that. We can have implantation devices for Parkinson's. Can we have implantation devices for depression? 

Now there's a public question, how far do we want implantation using deep brain stimulation techniques to go? There is I think for me, a role in universities

Involving the public in that kind of broad conversation about what is acceptable and how far this technology should go. That is just one example of the kind of contribution I think universities can make through the public conversation being based on informed experience, rather than leaving that to the public as an uninformed conversation. 

I think we have a role to do that. I think it's a really important part of the role of engagement in knowledge exchange.

Neelam Raina: There used to be a pyramid structure to impact. You would do your beautiful research, you get a beautiful grant, you do some more research, and then when you’re sort of done with it and it’s starting to look really good,you start looking for engagement with policymakers to see if you could influence policy or not. That structure is no longer a pyramid structure where we actually build in research policy interventions, policy directions, needs analysis, and mapping the needs of policy, or the gaps in policy right at the start of a project.

Are policy interactions for footprints of researchers’ impact part of knowledge exchange? I’m looking for a box to put it in.

Mark Gray: Well, the great thing about knowledge exchange is that it's in a sense unboxed in the sense that knowledge exchange can start from any number of different points. 

I said right at the beginning that knowledge exchange has to be driven by intention. The intention involves for me, an openness to dialogue. It's about our engaging with that process of informing either a public debate, a sector debate, or whatever it may be. For me, knowledge exchange may from that point move in a number of different directions.

One of the things one might do as part of that ongoing conversation - whether with policy makers, companies or any number of external actors - is respond to something concrete. For example, here’s a piece of intellectual property that might help here, or a piece of training that might help here. For me, that isn't fully formed knowledge exchange, because it doesn't involve all of that effort to have an ongoing and continuous dialogue.

You mentioned earlier that co-production is one part of this apparatus of university research and an important part of the way in which we think of impact. I think it's important for knowledge exchange as well. 

So, we are not in general, doing successful knowledge exchange if we are just offering something. We are saying we have developed, for example, a solution to a deep brain stimulation device and saying, “Here it is. It’s available. Would you like it?” 

It seems to me that part of our knowledge exchange obligation is to enter into the kind of co-production that involves our thinking about what's necessary, what will work, how might reception be socially shaped, how might we assist that process, how might we find ways of getting ready and adoption?

That process of talking about how research moves from universities to communities shouldn't be about our saying, “Here's some stuff. Would you like it?” It should be about an ongoing dialogue, and for me that that dialogue is a very important part of knowledge exchange.

Neelam Raina: Let’s begin by looking at the metrics used to assess knowledge exchange. How do universities evaluate their performance in this area? 

If you could think of a knowledge exchange project or a framework that Middlesex has worked on, how did you judge it? How do you evaluate what the metrics are? I know you’re an economist, but I won’t hold you to it. What kind of metrics are we looking at shifting? What is the needle we want to move in whichever way? 

Mark Gray: Let's start with the metrics we have to adopt. There is a framework for evaluating what we do which is all values based. So it's about the value to the university - the monetary value to the university of the activity - and that's assessed through something called the Higher Education Business Community Interaction Survey that takes place every year. It evaluates the work that we did the previous year based on the values to the university. So this is purely monetary value. It doesn't say anything about the consequence of the knowledge exchange that we undertook. 

That is the basis upon which we evaluate - partly through the KEF, but also by other means as well. For example, we look at the amount of knowledge exchange income per FTE of academic staff, which is a common metric used across the sector. That's the basis. It's purely monetary. 

At the moment, the main means in which we evaluate knowledge exchange in the sector is that it isn't anything else. What we are moving towards, I sense, is a recognition that the consequence of the knowledge exchange is something which we shouldn't have to wait for a REF exercise to capture. 

So not all impact is necessarily associated with knowledge exchange, but equally not all knowledge exchange ends up as an impact case study in the REF. So how do we go about evaluating knowledge exchange? There are attempts to look at doing that. And I think across the sector, individual universities will do that in different ways. 

For me, the criteria of successful knowledge exchange are related to reception - that's a really important part. So, you are having that intended dialogue. So, how successful were you in explaining, accounting for, and shaping the value of the knowledge you were transferring? How did you do that, and what has the reception been? 

For me, the most successful knowledge exchange is when there is an understanding on both sides about what the knowledge exchange can do – based on the fact that both sides have engaged in framing that or shaping that. That shared process is a very important part of it. These are very soft, as it were, very non-Treasury methods of evaluating success. 

The second criterion, which I think is equally important, is to do with the benefit of the dialogue inside the university. For me, one very important part of knowledge exchange is that there should genuinely be an exchange, so we are gaining something inside the university from the act of engaging in knowledge exchange itself. 

So what have we learned? How has it moved our research agenda on? How has it shaped the way in which we think about evolving practice? How has it shaped the future research that we do? When I see good examples of that, there's a sense in which I kind of know it when I see it. I don't have, and the sector doesn't have, a framework for evaluating that.

I sense in time we probably will but on that broader question of how do we evaluate the effectiveness and knowledge exchange in general, we are still pretty much fixed with an external and a dominating mode of assessing the effectiveness and knowledge exchange which is driven by that monetary value metric. 

I think in time we will be moving in the direction of something which is going to try to evaluate impact rather more explicitly.

Neelam Raina: It sounds simple as a concept, but I think all these underpinning monetary value kind of judgments of it make it sound like it's focused in one direction, which is economic. 

Mark Gray: Yes.

Neelam Raina: We also have what we call CPD. Can you tell me about what CPD is as part of knowledge exchange? And can you tell us what we have done as CPD at Middlesex?

Mark Gray: CPD in general, is the process of – actually, it's pretty much as it says on the tin - continuing the development of professionals. 

So the starting point is that you are dealing with people who are broadly your peers. They are people who are also engaged in thinking about the issues you are thinking about. So if, for example, you are a researcher in social policy, you may be offering CPD to help practitioners in social policy think about how they can use new knowledge generated in research or from research in the domain of practice.

Lots of CPD consists of - to use a previously mentioned phrase - co-production: a process of thinking about ways in which we can make that knowledge useful in a context that is quite remote from research itself in some cases. 

Some of the most successful CPD that we have at this university has focused on taking areas of professional practice, where we have real expertise and equipping people in the NHS, for example, with new skills based on emerging understanding of where practice works where it needs to be developed. 

So I'm thinking of, for example, some of the work that we have been doing in both nursing and in social work where we have active CPD programmes that focus on precisely that. So how can we take what we now know works in the context of, for example, social work based on the research we do, and how can we enable social work practitioners to benefit from that know-how? Again, a lot of the evaluation or the effectiveness of that will be reflective. Good CPD evaluation involves not just immediate short-term gains – such as did you learn something from this programme - but longer-term benefits as well. 

Maybe going back after two, three years saying, how has your practice changed as a consequence of the CPD? What have you learned as part of that? Very importantly, there should then be a continuing dialogue between researchers and practitioners to pick up how that transformation has been successful and the areas in which it hasn't been. 

So what have we not been enabled to do, or what has changed in our environment that's made a good deal of that learning less significant than it might have been three or five years ago? Good CPD should genuinely be reactive at the level of changing CPD programmes to accommodate change that's happening externally. 

Neelam Raina: We call it MEAL - Monitoring, Evaluation, and Assessment of Learning, which is a circular process that is generally done externally to see that what you are doing is making a difference, and if it is not, what do we need to do differently?

Mark Gray: Yes, absolutely.

Neelam Raina: So it's an iterative process. 

Mark Gray: It is. 

Neelam Raina: But often this is done by an external person, so I am never going to evaluate my own research. 

Mark Gray: Yes.

Neelam Raina: I will get an external person to look at it.

Mark Gray: Yes.

Neelam Raina: Because it's collaborative work, they will look at the whole thing rather than just the research input - that sounds really interesting to me. If I was a business and my question was about scaling up - say I've been doing this and making decent profit margins - I need to, and this is something that happens to small and micro enterprise, that scale up remains the biggest challenge in their space for many reasons, not just financially. Sometimes it's capacity in addition to financial capacity. Is this something that universities help with through the knowledge exchange process? 

Mark Gray: It is, and something which is a very important feature of knowledge exchange generally. Not just because there is government funding for it, but also because universities are particularly well attuned to it. So we are sitting here in Hendon. 94% of the businesses in Hendon are micro businesses. 

So scale up for them means moving from one or two people operating the business to four or five. Some of the challenges there will be the same as moving from a business of 50 people to being one with an international distribution network and five factories. The same in that, at least in part, some of the challenges will be cultural within the business. 

In other words, you're going to change the way in which you think about that business. You’re going to have to think in new ways. You're going to, for example, as the owner proprietor of a business employing yourself and possibly nobody else, have to be willing to share a bit more perhaps in the business. 

One important feature of scale up that I think universities can help with is that there are very practical challenges about scale up. For example, finding ways in which to manage new resources or finding ways to source new resources, finding new ways to do things like marketing. 

Those are very practical forms of activity associated with scale up. But there's also the softer stuff. Being willing to trust in new ways, being willing to hold new forms of dialogue, being willing to share more of the future of your company, with employees and maybe changing relationships inside the organisational part of scale up as well. 

Universities can help with all of that, and that's the reason that there are programmes, like I mentioned one before, the knowledge transfer partnership that's very much about finding ways of taking the breaks off small businesses to enable them to grow. So, what's holding you back is part of the dialogue you would be having with a university, which might lead to a KTP. 

Many of the open dialogues we've had in the past here with businesses, both large and small, have been of that type. So what's preventing your company growing? What are the holdups? What are the things that are stopping you achieving scale? We can help with that, and universities are particularly good at it. I think now partly because of the funding, but also partly because of a lot of experience over a number of years. We are very good at helping with that kind of problem.

Neelam Raina: That's really interesting. I think the perception of universities from those who are outside universities, is that we are a teaching institution and that you have to be a student to be part of our community, or an academic teaching at the university. 

Of course, there are research fellows and postdoctoral candidates, so there's a whole research portfolio and profile as well. We are based at Hendon, at Middlesex University London, and we are part of giant networks, both geographically and conceptually, and also policy and donor related networks. 

Mark and I are in the same office at the Research and Knowledge Exchange Office at Middlesex University, and I am, through osmosis, understanding these networks a little bit better. But you know more about these cross sections at which we find ourselves. So, we are a higher education institution, but we are located in northwest London. 

We are also part of the creative industries. We have a science and tech, we have law and social policy, we have business, we have health. We do a lot of different kinds of thinking and know-how production. We locate ourselves across these transfers and transnational also in many cases, connectivity paces, which are knowledge exchange, promoters, supporters, incubators, whatever you want to put on it. 

Can you tell us a little bit about Middlesex Universities positionality or situatedness, or, I don't want to use a research jargon, but how and where are we placed to do this and what are the networks that we are plugged into right now? Almost like a sales pitch, if you will.

Mark Gray: I think for a university like Middlesex, those networks are an extremely important part of doing knowledge exchange. 

I won't talk about those networks in each and every faculty, but let me take an example which I think might be helpful. Going back to the example of bioengineering, those networks consist of connections with clinicians, connections with industry peers, connections with users of implantation devices, for example, patient groups. Now that's partly driven by the necessities of research. The research requires, if we are going to win research grants, showing that we are engaged with those groups. 

But the ongoing dialogue is important in shaping the knowledge exchange we do. So, thinking about, for example, patient involvement in the kind of bioengineering research I was talking about earlier. A good deal of that is required for research, but it means that we are having dialogues with patients around areas of real importance for that mission of taking the research outside of the university. 

So, just one small example from that work in knowledge exchange in bioengineering. It turns out that if you are devising devices for use with very small babies and keep on adding devices until they're absolutely covered in monitors, their success outcomes go down. 

Why do their success outcomes go down? Because skin on skin contact with parents is a real contributor to a baby, certainly a very small neonatal baby, overcoming the health problems it faces. Part of the shaping of the interaction we've done with both industry and with clinicians has been the result of that kind of interaction with patient groups where patients have been saying, the real frustration is that I can't pick up my baby. 

Then you start looking at the research and you identified this as a real problem, and you start shaping solutions around that. So, some fantastic work has been done here by colleagues in product design engineering, reaching into deep knowledge of what works in terms of product design, to shape the work that we did in that era of bioengineering. 

A lot of that has come from direct dialogue with patient groups. What I would say is that although it's driven by research and necessity (in other words, if you are applying for a grant for that kind of area), you are going to have to show engagement as part of what you are doing. Not just as part of the research you are doing, but you have done some engagement which has shaped the research you are doing. 

But I think for knowledge exchange purposes, in this particular case, finding ways in which we can encode the research in intellectual property and spinning out a business, a lot of the trajectory of that work has been shaped by our having those kinds of interactions with those kinds of groups. 

So, it's really important for us that knowledge exchanges are formed by having ongoing dialogues with those kinds of communities.

Neelam Raina: Thank you for that. That is quite a good example to kind of envision what we are talking about quite clearly in your head. In universities, we are not only part of the higher education sector, but also horizontally connected to others like ourselves. So it's almost like a knowledge ecosystem.

Mark Gray: Yes.

Neelam Raina: Where we exchange information with those who are in the community with us and the policy makers who are working with us, for us in parliament. But we are also connected sideways into others like us. All universities don't do all kinds of research. We do some that we are good at, and we look at others who do others. 

So, we are connected sideways with other partners. We are part of quite a few alliances. There was a corridor that you mentioned at some point of time. Do you want to tell us a little bit about those alliances and the corridors and our relationship to London and the mayor, and, you know, we are here. 

Mark Gray: I think one very important feature of knowledge exchange is that it’s on a national agenda and it's pretty clear that individual institutions can't necessarily address the whole national agenda. So increasingly knowledge exchange is involving universities working together. There is even a funding drive for this called the CCF Fund which is about trying to do two things. 

First of all, get universities to work together on knowledge exchange and then to share that practice across the sector so that we work together more effectively. There are a variety of mechanisms through which we operate at Middlesex, one of which is our involvement in the University Alliance, where we try to find ways for those institutions to work together more effectively, perhaps as a network to share their know-how in knowledge exchange, not just at the level of knowing how to do good knowledge exchange, but very practically. Here in Hendon, for example, we do a lot of excellent research, but not in every area. But there may be other partners that are doing research and have a know-how base that may be useful to people here. So how do we broker that? How do we make that happen to the benefit of businesses in the community here?

Secondly, we've got partnerships which are informal in the sense that we have networks like, for example, the Innovation Corridor Alliance that is a grouping of local authorities, universities, further education colleges, and we're looking to find ways in which those universities can work together in relation to the government's research and development agenda. 

So how can we support that? How can we work together to support that? That will involve, for example, engaging in bidding activity for new forms of knowledge exchange. We've done that in the past, for example, in relation to agriculture in the east of England, where a number of universities came together to find a way in which they could support that sector effectively from their research base. 

I think this is likely to be an even more important theme in the future that individual universities are going to have to recognise that they are not the sole providers of knowledge exchange. They may need to be the facilitators for others knowledge exchange. 

Because at the end of the day, if we are going to play the role of being anchor institutions for our communities, we have to be useful even when we personally can't be. That's a very important part I think, of knowledge exchange mission. We should be open to knowledge exchange, not just open to the knowledge we can exchange. 

Neelam Raina: There's a big difference between those two. And I think that is a fundamental part of what makes us a university, is that we are also brokers and catalysts. We are also channels of communication between things we know, people we see, issues that are of commonality or challenges, and we are almost like a corridor of information that transits through us. 

Yes, I think that is a very good way of understanding where we are at. Still my brain is whirring. I'm just thinking about how this all fits into how I frame research in my head and the REF and the KEF, but maybe the REF, KEF and the TEF will be a different conversation. We shall do an acronym podcast for anybody who has time to listen to that. 

Thank you very much for today, it's been very, very useful. 

If you want to find Mark Gray, he is on the University pages. He is also on social media, including Blue Sky. You can find Mark Gray online, and if you want to get in touch with Mark, he's at Middlesex University and you can find him on our pages, have conversations about the knowledge exchange system, ask him questions, and if you have any feedback or any comments on what Mark has to say, please get in touch with us.

Thank you very much for joining us for this podcast.

This is a series of podcasts you have been listening to from Middlesex University, exploring the research we do here.

You can find us on whichever platform you get your podcast from, and you can also find us on the research pages of Middlesex University, which is www.mdx.ac.uk/research.

All of our podcast episodes will be posted here for you to access for free. Thank you very much for joining us.

Goodbye.