 My name is James Bruce. I'm the Graduate School Director here at the Open University. I'm also a member of the STEM faculty. I'm an academic chemist by background. Knowledge transfer partnerships are an interesting way that I as an academic can work with an industry or a company in a very structured and managed way. They're government funded. They're the organisations called Innovate UK and they supply a facilitator that helps manage the relationship between the company and the university and I mean I've also worked with companies quite independently of that and you have to then put quite a bit of effort yourself on both sides from the company and the academic to develop your relationship and what the KTP offers is an independent person who helps you both both sides ask the right questions of each other so you're clear what I'm delivering to them as an academic and what I can expect to get back from the company. It does work well I think because you have that that independence oversight that almost holds you to account. They also help you frame the question so in terms of when you're applying for the funding they are making sure that you've actually got a defined problem that both the company and the university understand whereas other interactions you can be a little bit more speculative and sometimes a little bit of trial and error working out what's going on whereas here the facilitators through the the KTP programme basically help or coordinate that the both the company and the academic write the bid together so it's sort of well coordinated. To give you an example one I'm currently working with is with a company called the WJ Group they're a road marking and maintenance group in the UK. When I first encountered them they were an SME they're now a huge enterprise I think the biggest in the UK but they came to me because they wanted to innovate about road markings and they weren't chemists and I took the road marking for granted when I first to you and I it's just a it's a coloured line on the road typically white line and it's it's a piece of paint. In actual fact the recipe for it if you like is nearly 100 years old and they don't actually know why a lot of the material that they use is in there and what they wanted to do was find out why they needed to have the stuff in that they did and can they actually make a better road marking and so they were tapping into my expertise as a chemist my understanding materials because they wanted to come up with new and different ways of of putting road markings on the road road markings that last longer that are easier to see and that take advantage of some of the technologies that cars have that didn't have when they were first developed so a lot of lane control devices on modern cars are relying on contrast so the camera behind the the rear vision mirror tries to look for contrast in the road now in conditions of sunlight and water it can lose that contrast and so you don't get that benefit but in actual fact the camera can see wavelengths that the human eye can't see so we're looking at adding different compounds to the the road markings that the camera can see and it'll help the car maintain its lane discipline. This has quite big implications for self-driving cars and again this this company is really starting to wonder how they will contribute to the sort of infrastructure that self-driving cars will need and whether you can put some of the technology in the road as opposed to the car. I've tended to work with SMEs they are more designed I suppose to see SMEs because the government puts the greater proportion of the funding in if it's an SME and SMEs tend to have quite interesting and challenging questions to answer and to solve having said that large companies can can go in they have to put more of the the funding in and they are still a way that you can solve in a relatively low risk environment a quite challenging problem or question so I've worked with big multinational companies and I've worked with SMEs and I think the common thing is being fairly open and straightforward what what you're bringing to the relationship and the company being very clear about what it's trying to to solve and what it what it how it will measure its success so that you'll otherwise if you don't have that agreed fairly early on then you find the project start to sort of wander in all sorts of directions so it's always worth whether it's you know a big company or a small company you spend a little bit of time before you actually put the bid together building on the relationship and understanding what each other's interests and aims are