Entrepreneurship is a critical part of the Government's economic development efforts and is a major goal for local and devolved governments. However, the COVID-19 crisis threatens many entrepreneurial firms. Existing research on crisis management and resiliency is oriented towards large multinational firms and gives little guidance to how entrepreneurs can protect their companies and innovate their business models in times of uncertainty. This project will investigate how entrepreneurs across the country are reacting to this crisis. Through interviews with 60+ high-growth commercial and high-impact social entrepreneurs we will identify the immediate strategies entrepreneurs use to limit the damage done to their firms. Repeated interviews over the next 18 months will show how these strategies evolve from damage control to planning how to redeploy their existing resources and create new capabilities to take advantage of new market niches created by the COVID-19 pandemic. These interviews will produce a detailed and nuanced perspective on how entrepreneurs react to crisis and how these reactions change over time. Findings will be rapidly communicated to the entrepreneurial community to share best practices and local and national policymakers to help them craft the most effective policies for aiding the recovery of country's entrepreneurial economy.

AICCET will enable better prognostics, the process by which disease is diagnosed and the outcome of treatment predicted. This allows for improved treatment planning, a pre-requisite for a better patient journey and experience. It does this by avoiding unnecessary hospital in-patient care, enabling outpatient procedures using technologies which do not require highly specialised personnel such that clinics can move closer to the community they serve. This move away from hospital based healthcare is further enabled through monitoring patient health at home and managing chronic disease with solutions provided to the GPs, all moving healthcare further into the community. Examples of such interventions include: 1. Inch-worm technology provides a solution which reduces risk to patients, makes the device easier to use by NHS staff, and moves the procedure away from a costly secondary care location performed by specialised clinicians into a community out-patient setting. Public Patient Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) is particularly important for accelerating the impact of this technology, with significant potential for reducing healthcare inequalities as traditional endoscopy has reduced efficacy in certain patient phenotypes (high BMI, infirm or living with disability) and colonoscopy screening has reduced uptake in those with a lower socio-economic background due to difficulties accessing transport to a central hospital or from fear of the current procedure - leading to late diagnosis and poor prognoses. (Manfredi - University of Dundee). 2. Power frugal algorithms used in wearable electronics for the detection of scabbing in sheep can be applied to outpatients in the community who are soon to have invasive surgery. It has been shown that exercise prior to surgical operation helps positive outcome of surgery. The device will help reduce visit hospitals during the pre-habilitation and also post-habilitation phase allowing doctors to monitor remotely the progress made by the patients as they undergo prescribed training exercises. The AICCET consortium has gathered 14 organisations (5 universities, a further education college, 5 civic bodies, 1 hospital and 2 NHS organisations in the Tayside region to address the challenges of community healthcare. This consortium is in direct alignment with the "shift left" taking place in the continuum of care enabled by technological and process solutions that offer the highest quality of life for patients through the simultaneous provision of improved quality of healthcare and reduced costs of provision. AICCET is putting in place the mechanisms to accelerate impact in community healthcare of innovative research created by these 5 universities. AICCET sets up the foundations of a healthcare technology ecosystem addressing the barriers for research and innovation and increasing the connectivity to accelerate impact in community healthcare.

The role of the SUPA PIPSS Fellow will be to generate new collaborative research and exploitation projects which involve SUPA members, where there is a strong emphasis on knowledge transfer through collaboration with other partners. Although this will be a freestanding role that will prioritise Business Development within targeted market sectors, it will fit within the desired model for future expansion of KT, Project and Venture Support for SUPA activity. To retain focus, a few ambitious but achievable targets will be set for the Fellow. The balance between collaborative working and new venture creation recognises that appropriate KT routes must be created / in some instances this will be through new start up or spin-out companies, while in other circumstances it will be through working with existing businesses. The SUPA PIPSS Fellow will spearhead a new multi-institutional initiative focusing on Knowledge Transfer (KT) for university research that will benefit STFC, the participating organisations and the UK economy as a whole. The Fellow will take advantage of the synergies in research across SUPA, the breadth of commercial connections and the existing support networks to markedly increase KT outcomes.

This project will investigate if crowdsourcing can be used to aggregate the content of disparate, open-data sources across the internet to determine which patents underpin commercial products, and organise and present these according to technical criteria in a visual "gallery" form appropriate for engineering design. Patents are frequently used to quantify levels of innovation associated with specific regions or companies. However despite the development of sophisticated data mining tools to support the analysis of over 50 million online patent records, little is known about which patents are actually "commercialized" and how they are embodied in commercial products. Because of this "patent informatics" has been inherently limited to the study of the records, rather than the use, of Intellectual Property (IP). This information gap inevitably reduces the accuracy of academic and commercial analysis that use patent data for applications such as innovation research, R&D fore-sighting, and IP portfolio valuations. Furthermore, the presentation of existing data maps is not in a form that is useful for engineering designers when conceptualising and embodying products: it is predominantly text-based (and often deliberately obfuscated) when more visual presentation with exemplars and appropriate technical taxonomic terms would greatly enhance utility when undertaking engineering design development. Crowdsourcing utilises large networks of open people to compete discrete tasks. Virtual tools are used to co-ordinate the distribution, payment and co-ordination of results, resulting in a labour market that is open 24/7 and a diverse workforce available to perform tasks quickly and cheaply. The distributed network of human workers provide on-line, "black-box", reasoning capabilities that could far exceed the capabilities of current AI technologies (i.e. genetic algorithms, neural-nets, case-based reasoning) in terms of flexibility and scope. This project proposes that crowdsourcing can be utilised to access open data sources such as user manuals, product labelling, court proceedings and company web pages to understand which patents are actively used in current products and how they have been embodied. With a more accurate representation of innovation commercialisation, technical metadata (labelling), and utilisation, we envisage patent searches not as a stage-gate check but as a revitalised source of design inspiration. Indeed, if crowdsourcing proves a cheap, scalable way of collating this information and applying appropriate taxonomic and visual engineering information, it could fundamentally alter the early phases of engineering design. To this end, the project will result in a visualization tool that can be used to both guide and inspire design conceptualisation and embodiment.

We propose to create a collaborative programme of leading universities in the UK (Glasgow, Heriot Watt, St.Andrews and Strathclyde) and California (Stanford and Caltech) to create a network of universities, businesses and public sector organisations. The common theme will be the creation of economic benefit to the UK and US through developing opportunites around the general theme of photonics and photonics enabled technologies. Photonics technologies is interpreted very broadly and includes but is not limited to (a) advaced imaging technologies for the life sciences, (b) design, fabrication and measurement of devices for efficient conversion of solar energy into electricity, (c) sources and sensors for automotive and consumer products, (d) quantum-limited sensors for detection of acceleration, magnetic fields and encryption applications (e) environmental sensing applications. A range of researchers will be invlolved including, physicists, chemists, biologists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and researchers in biological and medical technologies.The programme will be delivered through a range of collaborative activites in the UK and US. These include the creation of a new kind of entrepreneurial fellowship enabling early career researchers from the UK to spend a year working in a Stanford, Caltech or affiliated laboratory. Staff exchanges between the partner orgnaisations to develop joint activites with clear commercial outcomes will be facilitated. Pilot projects to demonstrate the potential for commercial exploitation will be supported through the programme. An industrial affiliates' programme will be developed that will build on existing industrial networks associated with the partnering universities. This will facilitate businesses, large and small, in accessing networks and markets in the UK and US. We will create an investor network of individuals and companies interested in investing in photonics techologies emering from the collaboration. We will also undertake support and mentoring activites designed to ensure that companies and individuals are investor ready.The overal aim of the project is to build a network by sustaining enduring relationships that will lead to sustainable economic impact.