Business Engagement

Business Engagement Community of Practice

Aspect is organised into cross-institutional, cross-disciplinary communities, designed to capture and share knowledge across five core areas of practice. The Business Engagement Community of Practice (CoP) seeks to generate and share good practice on social sciences business engagement and encourage industry engagement with Aspect.

To find out more, or to join the Business Engagement Community of Practice, please contact Britta Wyatt: britta.wyatt@oxentia.com

Who is involved?

The Business Engagement CoP is made up of volunteers drawn from the Aspect member institutions, who have some responsibility for leading or coordinating business engagement within their organisation. Current CoP members’ responsibilities, for example, include working with businesses and industry to create commercial and philanthropic partnerships, handling alumni relations and working with academics to access funding to support business development.

What do we do?

The group are working together to generate and share good practice in business engagement for the social sciences via a range of projects, including:

• Deep Dives – The group are working on deep dives into specific sectors e.g. Fintech and Creative Industries to explore and map out what good practice looks like for social sciences business engagement in those areas

• Challenge led workshops – The group are running and engaging in workshops on topics that are of interest to the group and would benefit from sharing ideas and gathering the group’s insight into dedicated resources

• Business Engagement Ideas Box – Engagement with the business sector can add real strength to social sciences research activity and deliver significant, measurable and sustainable impact. However, the path from social sciences research, though engagement and partnership building, to the development and exploitation of business and commercialisation opportunities contains many obstacles. This project will tackle three of the key challenges: Peer learning, Academic engagement and Institutional support structures

Further information on these projects will be made available here: https://aspect.ac.uk/about/aspect-funded-projects/business-engagement-insight-generation/