Research and Knowledge Exchange Strategy 2020/21 - 2024/25 Building durable partnerships Research and knowledge exchange

Linking research and knowledge exchange, the University's strategy also talks about our place in London. We're aware of and understand London’s challenges, where fabulous wealth and global commercial values sit alongside some of the biggest social challenges in the UK.

Contribution towards tackling those challenges is a key plank of our strategy via London Met Lab: Empowering London. Integrating and extracting value from the research we do by co-working with external businesses, agencies, third sector and local governments, providing training and upskilling, advice and guidance, strategy consultancy, practical interventions and developing our long-standing Accelerator to drive entrepreneurship and to open up opportunities for our students and others wishing to develop business, remains a core element of what we do. Training, start-up support, and the deployment of students in research and knowledge exchange, often in co-working environments with our staff and partners, will drive our ambitions forward.

We have a strong presence within our communities in Islington, Hackney and Tower Hamlets, where our campuses and Accelerator are based. We have long exploited our space for public good and with values of civic and social responsibility, opening our doors to the community, putting on excellent and popular events. We do this for councils, businesses, charities, community groups, and our professional associates. We will also work closely with external bodies through official and durable memoranda of understanding, concordats, and also ways that respond to new challenges. Under this theme we also will work with our partners on COVID recovery programmes.

We consider projects related to consultancy and innovation as important vehicles for both producing valuable research output and for implementing knowledge exchange with industry. In social sciences and humanities, the community-oriented projects bring valuable data and provide the foundation for significant research, but in technical areas, in addition to the purely theoretical research, there are several other types of projects which can generate valuable research output. Amongst them are industrial research, proof of concept, and innovation type of projects, e.g. projects in Computing funded by Lloyds Bank and Innovate UK at the Cyber Security Research Centre.