Miguel Martinez-Alvarez receives his award

The University of Essex is celebrating National Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) Week after agreeing two new projects with businesses and seeing one of the graduate associates working on an Essex-led scheme win a national award.

Essex academics and talented graduates are now working on 13 active projects through the University’s KTP programme. The programme supports companies to access fresh ideas and talent by tapping into University expertise to innovate and drive their businesses forward.

The latest projects make the University of Essex’s KTP programme one of the most active in the Eastern region.

This week, KTP Graduate Associate Miguel Martinez-Alvarez also won a Business Leader of Tomorrow at the national Best of the Best Awards. Miguel has been working on a collaboration between Signal in London and the Language and Computation group at Essex.

Projects cover a whole range of areas from logistics at Felixstowe International Port to improving data communications on the rail network. The University is also working on projects looking at the impact of social welfare reform, using the latest technology to monitor human rights around the world and helping develop wearable technology which can monitor our health.

Companies and organisations the University is now working with include:

• LPA Industries
• Hutchison Ports UK
• Moira Benigson Executive Search
• Vitec Videocom
• Colne Housing Society
• Glowinkowski International
• Minority Rights Group
• Raytel Security Systems
• Poulten, Selfe & Lee
• Profusion Media
• Cerium Visual Technologies
• August International

KTPs are a national scheme aiming to support UK businesses who want to improve their competitiveness, productivity and performance by accessing the knowledge and expertise available at UK universities.

KTPs provide solutions to a specific strategic issue. Projects usually focus on a problem in a key area of a business, such as product R&D or developing new management processes.

The University of Essex works with businesses and organisations to identify a relevant academic team at our University. Together we recruit a high calibre graduate who will be based at the company as an Associate to manage the project. The project can last from six months to three years. The Associate will work closely with our academics, one of whom will jointly supervise their work alongside your team.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships are sponsored by the Innovate UK, Research Councils and a number of other bodies.
Sponsors fund:

• 67% of the project costs for an SME
• 50% of the project costs for large companies

Find out more about our Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.

Discover more about recent projects:

• Impact of welfare reforms in Essex
• “Revolutionary” data communication speeds set to be achieved on UK train network
• Do staff values match up to corporate ideals?
• Using data to understand customer behaviour