Significant research is produced in the academic sector, often without recourse to industry or practitioner requirements. Leveraging the research output of academia can only be effectively maximised by collaborative, contextual approaches to its design and interpretation, and where both researchers and practitioners consider each other's requirements. So far, generally poor levels of engagement between academics and practitioners has done little to enhance competitiveness and industrial performance. To counteract this, effective academic -business engagement requires the development of a greater understanding of the knowledge needs of the business communities by academia, the awareness and greater understanding of the knowledge available from Universities, and the provision of a framework for collaboration, particularly identifying cross-disciplinary opportunities leveraging the wide knowledge base that exists. Engagement is considered from the following perspectives: context, content and processes. The context relates to the operating environment that the firm is in and the alignment of the firm's goals and objective with that environment. This means that firms can adopt both formal and informal approaches to the demands of the operating environment by engaging in formal or informal business-academia collaboration. The content refers to the programme of action areas selected as part of the collaboration framework. Finally, the process refers to how the collaboration is handled - its organization and coordination, as well as motivation and incentives. The importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between academia and practitioners is reflected in the range of activities to encourage and facilitate it. A significant number of businesses will be identified that have potential for greater competitive advantage. Collaboration will involve functional forum activities. These include forums on marketing, HR, Innovation and SME's, engagement fellowships and placements, engagement workshops/distinguished professorial addresses and a high profile series of distinguished addresses from high profile national and international business leaders. Finally, a Business Summit will provide a focus to bring together all those involved in the activities. A major high profile academic and/or business leader will be the keynote speaker(s) at this event.

The project is going to investigate how internationally operating small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) see linguistic and intercultural barriers affecting their ability to trade abroad or with international clients. The team of researchers, from the University of Surrey, the University of the West of England, Bristol and the University of Wales, Newport, will work in collaboration with the Surrey and Bristol and South Wales Chambers of Commerce and a sample of SMEs in southern England and South Wales. The project will also explore how businesses and universities can collaborate to apply academic research into practice and meet the needs of SMEs in relation to intercultural trade. Previous investigations on language skills and intercultural competence for businesses have shown that businesses loose trade because they lack language expertise or do not have the necessary intercultural competence and awareness. This has a marked impact on economic growth: it has been estimated that as much as 21 billion pounds annually are lost annually because UK SMEs are unable to engage fully in foreign markets, and that adopting a corporate policy emphasizing these skills could result in businesses achieving 44.5% higher export sales. A survey and interviews with SME managers will be carried out to explore in detail the barriers to international trade UK SMEs feel they face in relation to language and intercultural communication skills, what existing corporate strategies they have in place to deal with them and what support they need to meet training needs. Moreover, we will also attempt to differentiate markets in which English poses a barrier to trade from those in which it does not. The findings of this research will be used to identify areas in which SMEs need support and ways in which universities can collaborate with SMEs. The research team with their empirical expertise in the study of intercultural communication and languages are uniquely suited to offer that support. The results of this survey will be fed back to the public and the business community through a dedicated website, a twitter feed and a networking event that will bring together SMEs, business intermediaries (e.g. Chambers of Commerce etc.) and researchers in business studies, language and intercultural studies. They will also feed into the development of the Export Communications Review (ECR) and the training programme for language consultants working with UK export SMEs. Moreover, we will engage with the media and with schools to ensure that the public is made aware of the personal, economic and societal value of intercultural awareness and language learning.

Society is driving the need for Responsive Manufacturing and requires fundamental research to come-up with strategies that can complement existing Modern Manufacturing Practice (MPP) (e.g. batch, mass and just-in-time). Driver 1 is Big Demand, which concerns the response, volume, variety and location in demand, arising from large-scale events, such as COVID-19, Brexit, Disaster Response, Global Financial Crisis and War, and mass-customisation/bespoke products simply cannot be met by MPP, such as automotive production lines and supply chains, as they have been optimised for particular products. Driver 2 is accommodating dynamic production constraints. COVID-19's measures of social distancing and tiering system as well as trade disputes (Brexit and America vs. China) have shown how quickly MPP can be severed, significantly reducing supply to society. Driver 3 is facilitating manufacturing independence. MMP has enabled large developed nations - America, China, EU, Japan, South Korea, India - to provide production capability that developed smaller (e.g. UK, Switzerland) and developing nations would not have had access to. However, many society's view manufacturing independence as a strategic goal (e.g. Reshoring) especially in light of Drivers 1 & 2 where a nations reliance on other nations' manufacturing capability leaves them vulnerable and without the capability to combat their national needs. Brokered Additive Manufacturing (BAM) will prove that these drivers can be met through a nation's highly distributed and diverse Additive Manufacturing (AM) capability if it can be effectively brokered. BAM brings together world-leading researchers from the Schools of Civil, Mechanical and Aerospace engineering and Business Management, 300+ leaders in the AM industry (GTMA, AMUG, AT 3D Squared) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (CFMS), and industry/government initiatives (Reshoring UK) to create novel brokering of highly distributed and diverse manufacturing systems. BAM's transdisciplinary approach will see the team: 1. profile Big Demand, dynamic production constraints and local, regional, national and global contexts to facilitate independence. 2. develop Business Models and Government Policy. 3. characterise AM capability. 4. create Production System boundary condition models and agent-based models of BAM that simulate both human and machine brokering of jobs at community, regional, national and international scales. BAM solutions will be evaluated through controlled lab experiments, living labs and development of industry demonstrators. The solutions will give rise to a new class of production system that broker highly distributed and diverse manufacturing capability (e.g. AM). This will underpin factories of the future that are not confined to single facilities but are as diverse and distributed as the manufacturing capability they house, revolutionising society's production giving it greater flexibility and responsiveness to meet our future needs.

As European Green Capital 2015 and one of the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities, Bristol has challenged itself to transform by 2065 into a place where citizens 'flourish' by working together to create wellbeing, and achieve this equitably and sustainably. The Bristol Urban Area can legitimately claim to be in the vanguard of such urban transformation, and yet its development pathway remains characterised by paradox, and the need to deal with some stark realities and to challenge a 'business-as-usual' mind-set if progress towards aspirational goals is to be sustained. This proposal addresses a fundamental issue: what is stopping Bristol from bridging the gap between its current situation and the desired future as encapsulated in the City's various visions and aspirations? We have forged a partnership focused on the contiguous City of Bristol and South Gloucestershire urban area. We have secured the full backing of the two local authorities, Bristol Green Capital Partnership and Bristol Health Partners, the LEP, the local business community, citizen groups, and academics from across both Universities, with tangible commitments of support. Dissolving siloes through partnership, and a genuine interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration, is core to our approach, and hence both Universities have committed to share equally the financial resources with external partners in a three-way split. It is a key strength of this project that we are able to leverage extensively on internationally leading research assets, including: 'Bristol is Open', the FP7-funded Systems Thinking for Efficient Energy Planning (STEEP), the Horizon 2020 REPLICATE project, ongoing work at the £3.5m EPSRC/ESRC International Centre for Infrastructure Futures (ICIF) and co-produced and co-designed research such as the AHRC/ESRC Connected Communities and Digital Economy funded projects including REACT Hub, Tangible Memories and Productive Margins. We also have access to a wealth of highly valuable data sources including the 2015 State of Bristol Report, Bristol's Quality of Life Survey, and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents & Children that has followed the health of 14,500 local families since the 1990s. We intend to build on the ICIF cognitive modelling approach which identifies the importance of challenging established mental models since these entrench a 'business-as-usual' mind-set. At the heart is co-creation and co-production, and an acknowledgement that citizen behaviour and action are essential to the delivery of desired societal outcomes such as wellbeing, equality, health, learning, and carbon neutrality. The work programme synthesises existing domain-specific diagnostic methodologies and tools to create a novel Integrated Diagnostics Framework. We believe strongly that unless an integrating framework is developed to bring together multiple viewpoints, the diagnosis of urban challenges will remain fragmented and understandings will potentially conflict. We will apply this framework in this pilot project to diagnosis complex problems across four 'Challenge Themes': Mobility & Accessibility, Health & Happiness, Equality & Inclusion and the 'Carbon Neutral' city. We have appointed 'Theme Leaders' who are all 'end users' of the diagnostics, ensuring that the process of investigation is cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary, participatory and grounded in real-world context and application. The legacy of the project will be threefold: firstly innovation in the diagnostic framework and methods needed to address urban challenges; secondly its application to the Bristol urban area and the resulting diagnostics synthesise across the four Challenge Themes; and finally the formation of an embryonic cadre of cross-sector city leaders with the capability to apply integrated diagnostics and challenge the prevailing 'business as usual' approaches.

The UK and global research and development communities have made tremendous strides in electronic device prototyping. Platforms that support conventional electronics have become well established, and the emerging potential of printed electronics and related additive technologies is clear. Together these support fast and versatile prototyping of the form and function of digital devices that underpin novel interactive data-driven experiences, including the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable technologies and more. However, challenges remain to realise their full potential. Interactive devices prototyped in labs and makerspaces implement novel capabilities and materials which require holistic manufacturing capability beyond simulation of conventional electronics. Even for conventional bench designs, to make the transition from prototype to product they need to be suitably robust, safe, long-lived, performant and cost-effective to deliver value as products - whether as a series of one-off mass customised devices, low-volume batches, or mass-produced artefacts. Unfortunately, the transition from prototype to production is not a natural one for end users; many ideas with potential don't progress beyond the first few designs. Democratising access to device production is the key next step in underpinning scalability and entrepreneurship in digital systems. We propose a Network+ of universities, research organisations and commercial enterprises who share the common goal of improving the transition from prototyping to production of digital devices. The Pro2 community will build upon the design and fabrication expertise of its researchers and practitioners to facilitate a deep synthesis of established principles, techniques and technologies and develop new concepts that span computer science, engineering and manufacturing. We will complement the on-going global investment into a variety of 'digital manufacturing' topics - including the UK's Made Smarter initiative - by tackling the challenge of progressively and cost-effectively transitioning from unconventional and single digital device prototypes, through tens of copies that can verify a design and validate utility, to batch production of hundreds to thousands of units. In prototyping, as additive manufacture and printed electronics converge further, in unconventional fields such as soft robotics and 4D printing, we need to identify how to integrate and optimise tools into workflows that support digital behaviour across materials, scales and functionalities. In production, smoothing the path from one-off microcontroller prototypes to scale-up is a significant challenge, and requires new processes and tools as well as reconfiguration of business models and services. Our vision for 'organic scaling' from prototype to production will allow faster exploration and exploitation of these digital device concepts and applications. This will accelerate the adoption of IoT, the growth of new consumer electronics markets, and more generally underpin the data-driven digital transformation of many industries. It will enable new research directions, create new business opportunities and drive economic growth.