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 the social sciences, and vice versa.

To find out more, or to join the Business Engagement Community of Practice, please contact Lisa Gilmore: Lisa.Gilmore@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 currently meets on a monthly basis to learn from and exchange ideas with one another and convene around Aspect funded project activities. Themes the COP is keen to explore include: engaging academics, engaging partners in different sectors, and using the right language and mechanisms to best enable this engagement with the social sciences.

The COP members take turns to host knowledge share sessions at their monthly meetings. COP members are encouraged to put forward additional ideas for speakers, case studies from your institution, or other challenges you wish to explore. An example of some proposed topics for future session are listed below.

• Building networks around different research clusters:  Outcomes from a recent project and the insights from the process
• Strategic Partnership Workshop: A case study/example on how to stimulate engagement between social sciences and business, and a discussion on how to apply this model with the social sciences
• Examples of engaging partners with different social sciences disciplines: Insights on what has been effective in Human Behavior and Policy Institutes, and a discussion around other areas that have been challenging
• Insights from the Aspect Internationalization project
• What works for engaging third sector partners?  
• How do different institutions manage relationships with contacts within their institutions, and how to develop a joined-up approach?

In the first phase of Aspect (2018-2021) the COP also worked together to generate and share good practice in business engagement for the social sciences via a range of projects, including: Sector Deep Dives, Challenge-led Workshops, and the Business Engagement ‘Ideas Box’. Outputs from these projects are available on the funded project page.