How we’re growing businesses with Management Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

What is management KTP?

An mKTP is a stream of government funding via Innovate UK. It has been set up to improve management capability in UK businesses - under the Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme that transfers new knowledge and expertise from universities into businesses.  Projects are delivered by a member of university staff – who is fully embedded into the business - over a 12-36 month period, delivering commercial impact to grow the business.

What do the businesses gain?

Businesses LOVE management KTP!  It makes total sense to them – why wouldn’t they want help to understand their business better, help to understand how to grow and mature the business, and help to understand the key strategic challenges they face?

Our projects are giving our partners the confidence to understand and interpret what is going on in the business and then assess, evaluate and make impactful changes.

What is the university gaining from this?

As well as the satisfaction of a job well done and a noticeable change in capability and confidence within our partner businesses, we are gaining a huge wealth of knowledge.

The academic colleagues who are partnering with businesses on management KTP are all experienced and knowledgeable academics with good applied knowledge. They are all using the insights (suitably anonymised of course!) in their teaching and for research.  What we’re learning directly impacts the teaching of our students now and in the future.

We’re also bringing our student and business communities together – new student projects, new guest lectures and new opportunities to collaborate around specific themes are being established and this helps all parties.  We’re using our insights to feed into regional policy and stakeholder groups and to hopefully share our knowledge across the region.

What are the common themes?

Ambition, a growth mindset and an aspiration to ‘do better’ are all common themes.  Our projects now cover pretty much everything across the full spectrum of business process and management:  from strategic marketing and internationalisation; to culture change and leadership development and from increased productivity to entrepreneurial thinking and sales development.  If we’ve got that expertise in our Business School, then we’ll work with the business to find a solution.

The businesses we’ve partnered with are all very different – from manufacturing and construction to greeting cards and textiles - and at all stages of the supply chain. The funding is not sector or geographically dependent; so we work across all areas (literally!).  No two businesses are the same but some of the challenges are; and there’s a real strength and depth to our knowledge in addressing common themes across different sectors.

Management-focused KTP is addressing a key challenge for businesses - particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – how to do something differently without sending the rest of the business over a cliff edge…

And what about the future?

Management KTP funding isn’t going anywhere.  Funding has been secured to continue this line of project in future years, a clear endorsement of the value of the projects.

Leeds Beckett continues to develop new projects - the appetite from business is there and we haven’t (yet!) exhausted the expertise of the Business School so we’re keen to engage and talk to businesses.

If you’d like to find out more, visit our website and get in touch.