JISC

Download the briefing paper

This briefing is for senior management teams, heads of research and enterprise, external relations & strategic partnerships, leaders of business and community engagement (BCE) activities, employer engagement, and IT directors.

“Institutions that fail to engage with business and community organisations...are
in the future going
to really struggle
to justify why they should be receiving such large amounts of money from the public purse”
Professor Paul Younger, Director of the Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability

The Context

Universities and colleges are expected to share knowledge for the benefit of society; business & community engagement (BCE) is now recognised as their ‘third mission’ alongside teaching and research. They may partner with external organisations for research, or open up to employers and the community, for example by offering training and courses to support lifelong learning. JISC has explored ways of making BCE into an asset rather than a liability by looking at three broad areas related to its success: organisational capability, strategy & intelligence, and external impact.

The Rewards

• Sharing and exchanging knowledge and expertise with the wider community results in a more skilled workforce
• The college or university becomes more relevant to the ‘outside world’ and its needs
• Partnerships deliver mutual benefits and can earn revenue for the college or university
• Partnerships can enable innovation.

What We Know Already

What is BCE?

Business and community engagement covers the relationships which academic institutions create with external organisations and individuals. It has four dimensions:

Employer engagement describes the activities people tend to map between learning & teaching and external organisations. They include Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and workforce development.

Knowledge transfer and exchange refers to relationships between the research functions of institutions and external organisations, such as consultancy and collaborative research.

Lifelong learning is the interaction between learning & teaching and individuals outside the institution, as in community-based learning.

Public, community and cultural engagement covers a range of activity, usually engaging individuals and wider society with the activities of the institution, such as public lectures and events.

The importance of strategy

Making BCE part of your overall strategy is vital. It will help you play to your institution’s strengths, making good use of your skills and resources, and using IT to support them. Institutions must make strategic choices about the BCE services they offer, and focus on areas of strengths in research and education.

External engagement is often ad hoc rather than strategic, following researchers’ interests or informal networks. The key is to raise awareness of BCE, put a strategy in place and develop enabling skills and opportunities without losing this ‘informal engagement’. It’s important to identify interactions which can become strategic partnerships – managed corporately and consistently – or project partnerships, or more informal interactions; the process and resource needed for each are different.

“The whole agenda around knowledge exchange and innovation is really a key plank of a sustainable economy for the UK”
Professor Di Martin, CIO, University of Hertfordshire

Skills and capability

Staff need the right skills to engage with business and the community. Experienced staff with the business skills needed – for example negotiation, facilitation and high- level presentation – are at a premium. JISC’s ‘Supporting & Embedding CPD for BCE’ project supports CPD for staff working in this area. It is producing an online diagnostic self-assessment tool that will allow staff to enhance their professional development in BCE by exploring their capabilities across key BCE competency areas.

How can IT help?

It’s important to coordinate your operations and resources to respond appropriately to external demands. You also need ways to network, share information and manage relationships with external partners. IT can help; it makes sharing knowledge and communicating with partners and audiences easier and more sustainable:

Infrastructure (people, process and systems): The size of many colleges and universities, and the range and quantity of members, partners and clients they engage with, means that good relationships need to be managed if they are to be successful. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a management strategy with associated technology that enables an organisation to derive mutual business value from customers and partners, and develop stronger relationships with them.

Access management: Access management is the process of providing controlled, secure online access to resources. It underpins e-learning, e-research and digital library activities for a wide range of audiences, such as community or business partners and part time learners who may need to access material remotely. Providing the right sort of access to these different groups, depending on their relationship with your institution, can be complex.

 JISC’s ‘Extending Access Management into Business and Community Engagement’ offers practical help.

Online research expertise: This is about promoting research expertise online for external audiences and improving the online presentation of research ‘offers’. It includes aspects such as open access for selected research outputs, packaged and tailored for external audiences, so increasing their impact.

JISC’s ‘Online Research Expertise’ self-assessment toolkit helps you assess your online communication of information about the expertise of researchers within their organisation. Does it meet the needs of business and wider communities, as well as the researchers themselves? It covers assessing what you do now and identifying what you need to improve.

Open innovation and online services

The ‘open’ agenda and digital technologies play a significant part in BCE. Open innovation proposes that organisations can and should open up institutional ideas and knowledge to external parties for co-development, in order to generate innovation, new opportunities, harness new resources and reach new markets.

Open innovation can enhance a college or university’s research and development profile, its market presence, business opportunities and income streams. Co-development can bring efficiency gains, for example by bringing complementary capabilites together.

Online collaborative tools: The vast majority of BCE collaborative work depends on collaboration through email, telephone or online tools and resources. A wide range of tools is available, ranging from email, instant messaging, Skype and webinars, to Huddle (for file storage and project management), and Moodle, Wordpress and Wikis (quite different tools for creating online community and collaboration space).

See JISC’s ‘Using Collaborative Online Tools for Business & Community Engagement’ infoKit.

Engaging with SMEs

Web technologies can help SMEs work with you by shaping many of the contexts of engagement. Web tools help create an educated workforce with skills including the use of latest digital technologies; provide accessible training/ lifelong learning; link development/business support partners in a knowledge transfer project creating a commercial product.

JISC’s ‘Acumen’ web-based resource provides detailed information, tools and case studies to help you engage successfully with small and medium sized enterprises.

Getting Started

Raise awareness

Is BCE currently a key focus for your college or university? If not, raise awareness: use committees and senior management meetings to talk about it, and discuss with those who would have an interest – for example work- based learning practitioners, business and research units, volunteer and student placement teams, and events teams.

Review where you are

Use our Embedding BCE workbook to help you review your approach to business and community engagement, and identify your strengths and weaknesses.

Check your strategy

Is there a strategy for BCE? Is it related to other relevant strategies such as those for IT and marketing? Read more about strategy in our Embedding BCE InfoKit.

Look at your business processes and systems

How suitable are your business processes and the systems that support them? You need the infrastructure and skills to enable BCE:

IT – Strategic BCE requires that information relating to BCE activities is consistently recorded, shared and aggregated across departments and functions. BCE may require off-site access to allow collaboration with external partners or for lifelong learners to access virtual learning environments. Including BCE in your information management strategy and operation will help give IT departments the necessary direction and support.

HR – How are staff rewarded for their work in BCE and are BCE activities additional to their workload? Do they have the necessary skills?

Finance – how are BCE activities resourced and accounted for across departments and how is their income managed?

BCE-related business units and facilities – for example, innovation centres, business schools, enterprise units, business incubation units, conference centres and museums. What services do they provide and how are they coordinated? Are they accessible and suitable for use by business and the community? Read more in our ‘Embedding BCE’ infoKit.

Relationships

Does your college or university manage relationships with external contacts? Do you have a CRM system, and how developed is it? Read more about managing relationships in the ‘Managing your customers’ guide in this series.